How I need to learn to mourn with those who mourn

When news broke that Rick Warren’s son, Matthew, had taken his own life, it wasn’t long before the outpouring of support gave way to a more repugnant sentiment.

People taking to social media to mock Warren’s faith . . .

To declare his family’s heartbreaking loss to be some sort of payback for his theology or his politics . . .

To speculate on his son’s eternal destiny.

Paraphrasing John Armstong’s timely response to these attacks, the words pathetic and cruel come to mind.

I don’t claim to be a huge Rick Warren fan. I don’t go in for his style of church. Theologically and politically, he and I are probably worlds apart. And I could never quite get into the whole “purpose-driven” thing — even though I was employed by his publisher during the heyday of his mega-bestselling book (and therefore indirectly benefited from it). And yes, I did read it.

So it would be pretty easy for me to congratulate myself for not jumping on the bandwagon of judgment being directed at Warren by a few trolls on the internet.

Except . . .

Despite our differences, I like Rick Warren. He comes across as a nice enough guy. I kinda sorta met him once, and he seemed every bit as warm and approachable in person as he does on TV.

And you have to admit: even if you don’t share all of his politics or theology, Rick Warren is a way better ambassador for evangelicalism than some of the other current and former contenders. His PEACE Plan is something to be admired — even if you disagree with some of the particulars (or just don’t share Warren’s penchant for acronyms).

In other words, it’s easy for me to sympathize with someone like Rick Warren.

So what if it was someone I didn’t just disagree with — what if it was someone I actively disliked?

What if it was John Piper, who doesn’t merely express what I think is some rather sadistic theology, but seems to delight in doing so?

What if it was Mark Driscoll, whose misogynistic rants have wounded more than a few of my friends?

What if it was James Dobson, whose unholy mix of Christianity and right-wing politics has arguably done more than anything else to drive people away from faith?

If any of these three suffered a comparable loss, would I grieve for them? Would I feel sorry? Or would I feel smug?

I have to be honest. The answer scares me a little.

In his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul encouraged believers to “mourn with those who mourn.”

I’d like to tell myself that Paul is asking Christians to mourn with other Christians, and that Piper/Driscoll/Dobson [add your nemesis of choice here] hardly qualify as good models of what a Christian ought to be . . . therefore we are exempt from mourning when they stumble or suffer loss.

It’s OK to be smug when people like THAT suffer.

Except that it’s not.

You see, Paul wasn’t just talking about how we treat other Christians, those who think exactly like we do, or those we find it easy to like. Just one sentence earlier, Paul also said, “Bless those who persecute you,” which would seem to rule out a narrow interpretation of who he means by “those.”

Bless those…

Rejoice with those…

Mourn with those…

“Those.” As in everyone.

We bless, we rejoice, and we mourn with any and all, because we believe that no one is beyond redemption. We believe that no one is beyond God’s love. A relatively new friend of mine, Trystan Owain Hughes, has a timely (and challenging) piece about this very thing.

It’s not easy to mourn with those we dislike. But perhaps the true test of our willingness to follow Jesus is not our ability to grieve at the suffering of our friends, but at that of our enemies.

So today, I will grieve with Rick Warren. But I’ll be honest and admit that it’s easy for me to do so. It’s easy to grieve with those whom I like. So I will also pray for the strength to grieve with my enemies when they stumble or suffer loss.

How the new pope could change everything (without even trying)

Much has been made of the new pope’s humility over the last few days . . .

The pope who chose not to use an elevated platform to address the crowd after his introduction, preferring to stand among his fellow cardinals rather than above them.

The pope who eschewed more ornate attire for a simple white cassock — a sharp contrast to his predecessor and to all the grandeur of the Vatican.

The pope who asked the people for their blessing before he presumed the right to pronounce one on them.

The pope who rode the bus back to the hotel with the other cardinals, instead of taking the private sedan that is now one of the many perks of his new job.

The pope who stopped by his hotel the following day to pick up his own luggage and pay his own bill.

The pope who actually knows how to crack a joke.

The pope who interrupted the procession to his own installation in order to bless a disabled man.

As a cardinal in Argentina, Jorge Mario Bergoglio lived in a simple apartment, cooked his own meals, and rode the bus to work.

Like the saint from whom he took his name, Francis dreams of a “poor church [that is] for the poor.”

Make no mistake: Francis is no progressive. Don’t expect to see him rethinking the church’s stance on a celibate priesthood, contraception, women priests, or gays and lesbians. Even if he were inclined to be more of a reformer than he is, time is not on his side. The new pontiff is 76 years old, bucking all the pre-conclave speculation that the cardinals would choose someone younger to succeed Benedict.

So don’t expect much institutional or theological change in the Catholic Church over the next few years.

Still, Pope Francis could effect a different kind of change. All the early signs suggest that he will try to build a Church that is humbler, more accessible, more reflective, more aware of its own shortcomings. A simpler church for a complex world.

It would be a welcome change.

Don’t get me wrong. As someone who grew up without much liturgy, I’ve come to appreciate the pageantry — the pomp and circumstance — of the liturgical tradition. I find comfort in its rich symbolism and its contemplative rhythms. I love it when my Episcopal church breaks out the incense (which we don’t do as often as our Catholic brothers and sisters).

But there is danger in becoming too remote, too far removed, too caught up in ourselves and in our traditions — at which point a liturgy that was originally meant to connect people to the divine becomes instead a barrier, keeping them at arm’s length.

We need liturgy. We need ceremony. Maybe even a little pomp and circumstance now and then. But we must not build these edifices as monuments to our own tradition.

Several years ago, while touring St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, I overheard a priest telling a group of students why the interior was so ornate. It was because God deserves the very best, he explained. Maybe so, but it’s easy to forget that God intends for his church to direct its wealth outward, not inward.

This is not just a Catholic or a “high church” problem, either. While in college, I took a class trip to a prominent evangelical megachurch. They were about to embark on a multimillion-dollar campaign to build a state-of-the-art auditorium (not a “sanctuary,” they were quick to point out). They were one of the first to put a Starbucks-style coffee shop on their “campus.” Their worship services were finely-tuned productions — no less elaborate than the most ornate liturgical service.

Our guide explained that they wanted everything they did to be characterized by “excellence.” Hence the auditorium, gourmet coffee, and elaborate weekend productions. But he was stumped when someone from our group asked how they drew the line between excellence and self-serving opulence.

We all need to hear Francis’ warning against “the spiritual sickness of a self-referential church.” We should all hope he succeeds at reshaping Catholic tradition.

Because if he does, he might end up changing it for years to come. If his desire for a simpler, humbler church — a “poor church for the poor” — manages to reinvigorate Catholicism, it may be harder for it to return to the status quo when the time comes to select a new pope.

And at the end of the day, a humbler, more reflective Church might just become a more welcoming place for those currently relegated to the margins.

A Palestinian Christian’s view of the occupation

This is part 2 of a series on rethinking the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a Christian, inspired by the most recent assault on Gaza. Part 1 can be read here.  

When I was a kid, I had a t-shirt with a picture of Snoopy carrying an Israeli flag, trailed by Woodstock marching with an American flag. The caption below read, “America is right behind you.”

So yeah, I guess you could say I was pro-Israel. After all, how could you be an evangelical and not be a supporter of the Israeli state?

The dominant narrative of the American evangelical subculture says the Holy Land belongs to Israel alone. It’s an everlasting inheritance rooted in an irrevocable, unchanging covenant with God himself. (More on that in another post perhaps.)

The establishment of the Israeli state in 1948 is looked on not just as an important event in the life of the Jewish people, but as nothing less than the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, inaugurating the beginning of the end times.

Israel’s defense, then, is America’s sacred responsibility, our first and greatest foreign policy commitment. (That was something both candidates in the recent presidential campaign actually agreed on.) As such, no criticism of Israel will be brooked. Palestinians are, at best, squatters with no rightful claim to the land — and at worst, terrorists who would ignite a second Holocaust, given the chance.

Add to the mix our present-day worries about “radical Islam” and our tendency to paint all Arabs with the same brush, and it becomes far too easy for us to view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in simple terms of good guys vs. bad guys. Christians and Jews together on one side, presumably, and Palestinian Islamists on the other.

That is, until cracks begin to appear in the façade we’ve created to help ourselves sleep at night.

Like the fact that many of those working hardest for peace among Jews and Palestinians are members of the Jewish community. Organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace belie the supposition, popular in evangelical circles, that Jews and Palestinians are destined to be forever at war.

Or the fact that not all Palestinians fit the radical-jihadist-with-a-bomb-strapped-to-his-chest caricature. Not by a long shot. Not only are most Palestinians nonviolent (whatever their religion); many happen to be Christian. My spiritual brothers and sisters, united by a common faith.

For some reason, in my church we never talked about Palestinian Christians. Oh, we discussed at length the persecution of Christians in other part of the world, but never the suffering of our fellow believers in Palestine. We were oblivious to their existence.

For me, that changed four years ago, during what until this month had been the last major assault on the Gaza Strip. One of my colleagues at the time was a Palestinian Christian who grew up in the West Bank and later moved to America.

One day, she told me about her experience in the West Bank.

A Palestinian child injured in an airstrike on Gaza

She and her family had no freedom of movement, thanks to the 430-mile barrier the Israeli government began building in the mid-1990s. The barrier is rationalized as keeping would-be suicide bombers out of Israel. Yet it doesn’t just separate Israel from the West Bank; it cuts into the West Bank at several points, isolating Palestinian villages from each other.

For my colleague, this meant being cut off from her family in the next village over. Going to church meant risking arrest because there were just too many checkpoints. She wasn’t just deprived of her freedom of movement; she was deprived of her freedom to worship.

Freedom of movement is considered a fundamental human right, as is the freedom to worship. Both are enshrined in our Constitution. If these violations happened anywhere else, we would protest that freedom itself was under attack. We would call it persecution.

My colleague also described the experience of Palestinian children who have to walk past Israeli settlements on their way to and from school, subjected to taunts and physical violence from other children who’ve been taught by their parents to hate the Palestinians. Imagine if this were your daughter’s walk to school:

My colleague told me of Palestinian friends — particularly in East Jerusalem — whose homes were demolished by the Israeli government, usually on the pretext of not having the proper permits. (Never mind the homes and their occupants have been there for years.) In many cases, families have just minutes to gather what belongings they can carry before the bulldozers close in. They have no recourse, no due process.

Finally, my colleague revealed that she had no idea whether she’d ever get to see her family again. You see, if you’re Palestinian and you leave your homeland, the Israeli government (which controls who comes and goes in the West Bank) may not let you back in. Consider this example, reported in the Baltimore Sun a few years ago:

Abdelhakeem Itayem, a Palestinian with American citizenship, was counting on a simple overnight stay when he traveled from the West Bank to Jordan on a business trip. Six months later, he is still there, trapped in bureaucratic limbo.

Itayem, 41, said the long delay has kept him away from his wife, Lisa, and their seven children, who remain in the family’s home near Ramallah. It has also cost him his job as a manager for a Palestinian distributor of foreign consumer goods. “It’s breaking my heart,” he said.

Activists say scores of Palestinians who carry foreign passports, mostly American, have been denied entry this year after Israel moved to close a loophole that once allowed residents to enter repeatedly on renewable Israeli tourist visas.

The policy has created a quandary for the Palestinian Americans who remain: If they leave to get a new three-month stamp, they might not be allowed back. If they stay, their current Israeli visas will expire. Many say their past applications for formal residency in the Palestinian territories were rejected by Israel or never acted upon.

These and other tactics are part of a concerted effort to make life as unbearable as possible for the Palestinians. Then, when they leave, the Israeli government locks the door behind them.

Similar measures have been taken against people in Gaza, arguably the world’s largest refugee camp. Israel controls everything that goes in and out of that tiny, arid strip of land; Gaza’s fishermen can’t even fish their own waters on the Mediterranean coast without fear of being shelled by Israeli warships. In 2006, one advisor to the Israeli prime minister revealed that his country was deliberately trying to impoverish the people of Gaza. “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet,” he said, “but not to make them die of hunger.”

Imagine if a vastly superior military power had brought you and your community to the brink of starvation in order to teach you a lesson. How would you feel? How would you react? Would you be tempted to fight back?

And even if you believe modern-day Israel is one and the same with the Israel of the Bible …

Even if you believe the biblical covenant that promised the land to ancient Israel is somehow still in force today…

Even if you think Palestinians are outsiders with no rightful claim to the land (despite the fact they’ve been living there for hundreds of years)…

If that’s how you rationalize what’s going on in Palestine today, then surely you accept that Israel is duty-bound to follow the whole covenant, not just the part that supposedly gives them the land?

So what about Leviticus 19?

When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.

What about Deuteronomy 10?

You are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.

Ancient Israel knew what it felt like to be a refugee population at the mercy of a far more powerful nation. They were told by their God never to forget — and never to repeat — the hostility which they experienced at the hands of the Egyptians.

So can it be said the Israeli government truly loves the Palestinians in their midst? Can they claim to have treated the Palestinians as they treat their own? Or have they already forgotten what it feels like to be a refugee?

Because if they have forgotten, then they have broken the very covenant that promised the land to their ancestors.

Doing the right thing when it counts

Eight years ago, John Kerry ran for president against then-incumbent George W. Bush. The campaign was seen by many as a referendum on President Bush’s foreign policy, particularly the misguided war in Iraq.

There was just one problem, and it wound up costing Kerry the election.

Kerry, like most Senate Democrats, voted in 2002 to authorize the invasion of Iraq. At the time, President Bush still enjoyed post-9/11 meteoric approval ratings. Democrats were keen not to be labeled “weak” on foreign policy or “soft” on terror. So when the call to arms was sounded, the opposition marched obligingly in step.

By 2004, the public was souring on the ongoing occupation of Iraq, which put candidate Kerry in the awkward position of opposing a war he had once voted to authorize. To many, Kerry’s shifting position on Iraq looked more like political posturing than a principled stand. And for good reason.

Kerry’s ill-fated presidential campaign offers a cautionary tale on to those who would wait to do the right thing until it becomes the socially acceptable thing to do.

It seems the Church of England will have to learn this lesson the hard way. Having narrowly failed to approve women serving as bishops, the CofE found itself the subject of scorn, derision, and intense pressure from all corners. Last week even saw Britain’s conservative prime minister telling the Church to “get with the programme.”

So now, having failed to do the right thing for the right reason, the CofE faces the unenviable prospect of being pressured to do the right thing for all the wrong reasons.

The problem, summarized by N.T. Wright, is that progress isn’t always progress. The Church of England shouldn’t assent to women bishops because David Cameron tells it to or because it’s the sort of thing that social progress demands. It shouldn’t do so in order to salvage its last vestiges of cultural relevance.

The Church should embrace women bishops because Jesus accepted women as fully participating members of his kingdom — long before it was popular or politically correct to do so. Initially, the Church led on matters of equality; it’s only in recent history that it’s been leapfrogged by much of the rest of the world.

In the New Testament, women were the first to announce the resurrection of Jesus — the first to proclaim central message of the kingdom of God. Women were numbered among the apostles and deacons of the early church. To quote N.T. Wright:

All Christian ministry begins with the announcement that Jesus has been raised from the dead. And Jesus entrusted that task, first of all, not to Peter, James, or John, but to Mary Magdalene. Part of the point of the new creation launched at Easter was the transformation of roles and vocations: from Jews-only to worldwide, from monoglot to multilingual, and from male-only leadership to male and female together.

Within a few decades, Paul was sending greetings to friends including an “apostle” called Junia (Romans 16:7). He entrusted that letter to a “deacon” called Phoebe whose work was taking her to Rome. The letter-bearer would normally be the one to read it out to the recipients and explain its contents. The first expositor of Paul’s greatest letter was an ordained travelling businesswoman.

The kingdom of God carries a promise that all the old barriers which divide us will be swept away by the new creation — a new kingdom where all are welcome.

Sometimes it’s taken a while for the Church to give full expression to this ideal. (It took 1,800 years for the abolition of slavery to come about, for example.) Sometimes we’ve lost our way. When that happens, it’s the resurrection we should turn to, so we can be pointed in the right direction again.

Today, the main reason the Church of England should reconsider women bishops isn’t to appease an offended culture but so it may return to the values which Jesus instilled in his Church from the beginning — values which likely helped pave the way for the broader cultural embrace of gender equality.

Rejecting Junia

Over the past several years, my faith journey has taken me away from nondenominational, non-institutional expressions of the church. Since then, I’ve found myself belonging to the mother of all Christian institutions (well, apart from the Catholic Church): the Anglican Communion.

This journey might not have taken place if it weren’t for a wonderful little Church of England parish my wife and I belonged to when we were living in the UK in 2008. Being part of an active worshipping community that had been gathering in the same place since the 1300s has a way of putting my own faith journey into perspective. As I entered the sanctuary every Sunday, walking past tombstones of those who’d been dead for centuries, I was reminded: Christianity doesn’t begin or end with me. I am a tiny part of something so much bigger.

And so I’ve come to appreciate what the institutional church, for all its flaws, has to offer: a vital connection to our past. I think there is something significant, maybe even a bit mystical, in the idea of apostolic succession — in the fact that the bishop who presided over my confirmation is part of an unbroken chain going all the way back to the very first apostles.

Jesus gave those first apostles the authority to “bind and loose” — that is, to permit and forbid on behalf of the church — and I believe that authority is passed down through the church’s apostles, bishops, or leaders today.

Yet a deep connection to the past can either give you the courage to move forward, or it can hold you back. Which is why today, I have no energy to defend the institutional church. Not when my own mother church* tells half the human race, in effect, Your services aren’t required. The Church of England’s vote against women bishops was more than another nail in the coffin of its own irrelevance. It was a slap in the face to women who are tired of fighting for a seat at the table.

It was, I believe, a rejection of the very apostolic authority the institutional church depends on for legitimacy. How can you stand on the shoulders of the apostles when you implicitly reject one of their number? After all, Junia was a woman and an apostle (Romans 16:7). By rejecting women bishops, you are rejecting Junia, a vital part of our apostolic foundation.

This is about more than cultural relevance. It’s about more than making women feel welcome in the church (though that in itself is a worthy enough endeavor). By denying women their rightful place at the table — a place they had in the very beginning — we the institutional church are cutting our legs out from under us. We’re not just hurting women. We’re hurting all of us.

Apparently, God thought women were worth including among the apostles. Today, a minority in the Church of England seems to think otherwise. Sadly, that was enough to carry the day.

_________

*I’m grateful to be able to say that my own Anglican tribe, the Episcopal Church, welcomes women to serve at every level, even as presiding bishop.

My election night

By the time I arrived at the church building, I could already feel it. That slow, inexorable, churning agitation. The anticipation and the uncertainty of it all.

Who’s going to win? Will we even find out before we all stagger into our beds at 2 a.m.? What if the other guy takes it?

Just how easy is it to emigrate to Canada, anyway?

I love and hate election night. Love it… because, well, I’ve always been a political junkie. Hate it… because I don’t handle uncertainty very well. (More than one person has helpfully pointed out this combination is a recipe for a disorder.)

Election Day Communion photos from across the US

Inside the church, two liturgies were playing out side by side. On the left, a line of voters waited quietly to cast their ballots — the last of the evening in my state. To the right, inside the sanctuary, a small gathering prepared itself to receive the bread and wine of holy communion.

The tension drained from my body the moment I sat down. Bread and wine were the antidote for my ballot box anxiety. This ancient ritual, repeated over hundreds of years, has endured while politicians and parties come and go.

And yet…

We allow politics to govern our lives in a way the Eucharist does not. We allow politics to dictate our anxieties to us, to decide for us who we’ll associate with and who we’ll disown. All of which is another way of saying we’ve fashioned our political loyalties into an idol.

When we who are knit together in Christ’s sacrifice break fellowship over political differences, we have swallowed the lie that ballots matter more than the people who cast them.

When we who kneel at the altar of a crucified servant despair at our candidate’s defeat or gloat in his triumph, we’ve been duped by the propaganda that says it’s more important to win than to love.

Back in the sanctuary, as we lined up to receive the body and blood of Christ, the last of the voters outside were lining up to receive their sacraments, ballot and pen, by which they would pledge their political allegiance.

It may well be a valid thing to do. Many would call it our civic duty. I did mine earlier in the day. But it’s worth remembering: for all that our favorite politicians and parties promise, they deliver shockingly little, apart from another four years of anxiety and division.

Whereas…

When we line up to reaffirm our allegiance to Christ through holy communion, we are given something far greater in return. In the bread and wine, we receive the grace of God all over again. It is a grace that will not discriminate according to political affiliation, race, gender, orientation… and it will not allow us to do so, either.

God’s table is for everyone. That was far and away the best news I received on election night.

Turning the other cheek (when it counts)

Being the recovering political junkie (and nerd) that I am, I started watching presidential debates when I was a kid. I’ve witnessed the cheap shots (Michael Dukakis being asked to imagine his wife’s brutal murder), the zingers (“you’re no Jack Kennedy”), and the downright bizarre (Al Gore’s lockbox, anyone?). But I’ve never seen a debate as tense, as openly hostile, as the one between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney last night.

It left me (and probably a lot of other people) cold.

There are some debates where you can almost imagine the two candidates grabbing a beer together afterward. This was not one of them. It was more like a bar fight — Obama and Romney circling each other like a couple of high school jocks with something to prove, not even trying to conceal their dislike for each other.

Maybe it’s just as well politicians have stopped pretending to like one another. Maybe they’ve realized there’s little point acting all chummy when you’re face-to-face, all the while spending billions to shred your opponent on the airwaves.

But for those of us who are Christians, perhaps the real question is this: since when did Jesus’ command to “turn the other cheek” come with a list of exceptions?

Both President Obama and Governor Romney claim to be men of faith who revere the teachings of Jesus, as do millions of Christians who’ve staked out a position in this election, whether on the left or the right.

So why do we act as if these teachings no longer apply the minute we enter the political arena? What makes us think we can temporarily set aside these commands about loving your enemy and not repaying insults?

I don’t just mean the candidates themselves. I mean all of us who were calling for blood during last night’s debate. I mean all of us who’ve staked our hopes on the outcome of this election and were quietly (or not so quietly) urging our candidate to strike a fatal blow, to be merciless and unrelenting on the other guy.

Our complicity in the polarization of our society betrays our lack of faith. It shows just how little we believe in the teachings of Jesus.

“Turn the other cheek” is all well and good for Sunday School, but it doesn’t really work in the real world — on the campaign trail, in the boardroom, or on the battlefield.

But Jesus offers no comfort to those who would compartmentalize his teachings. In fact, the original context of “turn the other cheek” was nothing if not political. It was meant precisely for the campaign trail and the battlefield. Jesus was telling his Jewish compatriots how to respond to the everyday injustice of Roman occupation. If his words don’t apply in the political arena, then they don’t apply anywhere.

Maybe it’s because we’ve got so much hope — too much, perhaps — riding on the outcome of this election that it’s just too difficult for us to turn the other cheek, to love those on the other side of the debate. But isn’t true commitment measured by doing what’s asked of us precisely when it’s most difficult to do?

After all, “love your enemies” is not something we can do on the inside only. It has to be demonstrated by our words and actions toward the other person. Otherwise it isn’t real.

We cannot be salt and light if we continue to compartmentalize the teachings of Jesus. Because Jesus didn’t compartmentalize. He called on his followers to embody a new, all-encompassing reality — social, political, AND spiritual — right here and now. To do so, we have to stop clinging to the values and tactics of the old system.

If we really want to change the world, we must learn to turn the other cheek. Even on the campaign trail.

 

Rejecting political idolatry (article in Faith & Leadership)

Here’s an article I wrote about Election Day Communion for Duke University’s online magazine Faith and Leadership…

Every election year, we’re reminded that political idolatry — the temptation to put our hope in a particular party, platform or candidate — is all too alive and well.

First-century followers of Christ encountered political idolatry in their day — namely, the assertion “Caesar is Lord.” It was an assertion that Christians rejected wholeheartedly. Salvation was found not in Caesar but in Christ. Jesus, not the emperor, was the true Son of God, the light of the world.

Given Rome’s imperial dogma, you can imagine how subversive (and dangerous) it was to say, “Jesus is Lord.”

read more

On the vanity of partisan politics

Today a friend shared this video on Facebook, in which a reporter from ReasonTV, a libertarian video channel, interviews delegates at the Democratic National Convention to find out just how pro-choice they really are.
 

For many, the video highlights a glaring inconsistency in the Democratic platform. Apparently, “it’s my body, my choice” applies when you’re terminating a pregnancy, but not when it comes to drinking excessive quantities of soda.

My guess is the libertarian producers of this video were more concerned with the regulation of sugary drinks and light bulbs than abortion. Though in fairness, many libertarians are pro-life, because in their view, one individual’s liberty ends where someone else’s personhood begins. Either way, the inconsistency highlighted by this video is real. And troubling.

But imagine if someone had turned the cameras on the other party during their convention and asked, “Just how pro-life are Republicans?” On the one hand, the Republican platform calls for a constitutional amendment to protect unborn children.

But how pro-life is it to oppose the EPA’s efforts to limit mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants — a rule designed to protect children born and unborn from the well-documented health effects of such pollutants?

How pro-life is it to lead the country into not one but two wars of questionable necessity (assuming you believe there’s ever such a thing as “justifiable necessity” when it comes to war)?

How pro-life is it to play politics with climate change when the risks of inaction far outweigh the risks of overreaction in the unlikely event the scientists are wrong? Many experts in the humanitarian sector (in which I used to work) will tell you that climate change is the single greatest threat to all the progress that’s been made combating poverty, hunger, and disease over the last few decades.

Now it’s not as if one party is more virtuous than the other. The truth is, hypocrisy runs deep on both sides of the political divide. Those of us who are Christians would do well to remember this as we engage in (or disengage from) the political process this year.

Politics is not just the art of governing; it’s also the pursuit of power. And in our increasingly polarized society, it seems to be more about the latter than the former. Hence our never-ending election cycle.

That’s why Christians should be wary of getting too cozy with either party. Because we are called to serve, not to become someone else’s pawn in their accumulation of power. We are called to speak truth to power but never to seek it for ourselves. Ever notice how the Old Testament prophets routinely confronted the kings of Israel without seeking their favor or patronage?

It’s not that there’s no place for Christian political engagement. I believe there is. But I also believe our role is to be a prophetic voice, and you can’t do that when you’re a mouthpiece for one party or the other.

So when Democrats talk about protecting the vulnerable in our midst, we can applaud while also pointing out the blind spot in their thinking when it comes to abortion. And when Republicans talk about the sanctity of life, we can say amen while also reminding them that life is just as sacred outside the womb as in it.

This may not be a strategy for electoral success, but as Christians, aren’t we called to believe in something bigger?

Slaying the political idol

So last week I wrote about this thing called Election Day Communion, the brainchild of two Mennonite pastors — one in Indiana, the other in Virginia. Next thing I know, I’m helping out in my spare time.

Two Mennonites and an Episcopalian. We should start a moving company.

It’s too soon to tell whether this will end up being just a handful of churches or something bigger. There are hopeful signs, though, like this post from Kurt Willems. And this shout-out from Greg Boyd:

You guys, this is a brilliantly subversive idea! Please retweet & encourage your pastors to get on board! Awesome!electiondaycommunion.org

— Greg Boyd (@greg_boyd) August 26, 2012

There are rumors of at least one denomination coming on board.

But the lure of partisan politics is strong. It will not be tamed easily. Idols don’t go down without a fight, especially in an election year.

The truth is, too many of us have been swept away by the 24-hour news cycle, the relentless pursuit of power, the increasing polarization of our society.

These are not just the sins of the Religious Right. They’re the sins of all of us who’ve ever put our faith in a political messiah to bring about the kind of kingdom we think our country needs.

Remember when “hope” was more than a political slogan?

It’s not that our world doesn’t desperately need hope. It’s that hope never comes in the form of a ballot, a Super PAC, or a gun. It doesn’t come when we amass enough votes to impose our will on those living on the other side of the “us” vs. “them” divide.

It comes when we start doing what Jesus told us to do. When we take up a cross. Serve. Love. Sacrifice. Turn the other cheek instead of fighting back.

It comes when we subvert injustice and proclaim freedom to the broken and the beaten down.

It comes when we refuse to play by the world’s rules anymore, when we opt out of the world’s zero-sum power game. It comes when we stop trying to build an empire for ourselves.

So what if, when Barack Obama offers us “change we can believe in,” we remember the real source of lasting change? Body and blood, bread and wine. The gifts of God for the people of God.

What if, when Mitt Romney tells us to “believe in America,” we remember that we are called to believe in something bigger?

What if we start living like the resurrection really does change everything?