blip : Being Lonely In Paradise :

Here’s a sermon from last week. It’s about politics; and Jim Wallis is my straw-man.
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Title: Paul’s Politics
Date: January 21, 2007
Texts: Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; I Corinthians 12:12-31a; Luke 4:14-21

There’s so much talk about politics. If you pay attention to the news at all these days, it’s almost impossible to ignore the presidential fever in the air. Presidential hopefuls are putting their names in the hat for the race next year. And of course, there’s the change of parties in Congress. Everyone’s talking about bi-partisanship, and what’s going to happen with lots of Democrats in the House and Senate, while the President is a Republican. How will the politics play out? That’s the question I keep hearing, and the professionals generously offer their predictions.

There was a book published a few years a go that has fed the political frenzy for Christians. It’s called God’s Politics, by Jim Wallis. Yes, God’s Politics. Quite the title. I think it sounds a bit presumptuous. But it’s popular. Actually, when I was at Bluffton University meeting with students and preaching at their chapel, I can’t tell you how often people in the administration wanted to hear what I thought about God’s Politics—apparently Jim Wallis spoke there recently.

But I’m not here to give you a book report. Nor am I going to attempt something so spectacular as outlining for us what I think God’s politics are. Instead, I want to try something a bit more modest. I want to talk about Paul’s politics. Not God’s politics; not even the politics of Jesus; just Paul’s politics, the politics of Paul.

And the reason why this is worth preaching about is because—well, first of all it’s in the epistle passage assigned for today; but maybe more importantly, for Paul faith is political; spirituality is political. For Paul, Jesus began a new politics, a new politic, a new political body.

Last week we were in the first half of I Corinthians 12; this week we finish the chapter. In the first part of chapter 12 we heard that the good news is that God’s Spirit, the Holy Spirit, is present to us through each one of us as we gather to worship. As it says in verse 7, “To each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.” It’s about the common good, Paul says. God gives us the Holy Spirit so we can offer it to one another, and be joined together in God’s love. God’s Spirit is the grace that saves us from sin (our selfish lives), and binds us together; the Spirit shows us that we find life as we give it for the sake of each other.

The local gathered church is absolutely central for Paul. Through our gathering to worship God, we come to partake in God’s grace, the gracious and abundant outpouring of grace. Mysteriously, this assembly, this church, our humble fellowship, is overflowing with God’s Spirit, pouring out from each of us and binding us together in the love of Christ. That’s why I said we need look at what we do here with a mystical gaze, with patient eyes that learn to see the abundant grace of God through our worshipful fellowship; the Spirit comes through the material, through our bodies.

Now this week, the lectionary moves us into the second half of chapter twelve, and Paul develops further what he said in the first part of the chapter. But this time around, Paul takes up the language of politics—he calls the church in Corinth a body. And that’s political language. I’ll read I Corinthians 12, verses 18-20: “God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be… As it is, there are many parts, but one body.” Paul’s insisting on the point that everyone is absolutely vital to the rest of the gathering. He says in verse 12, “The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ.” And for this reason, since we all participate in the body of Christ together, Paul says in verse 21, “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you.’” Everyone who is part of this body, this church in Corinth, is part of the same body. And every part of that body is absolutely indispensable, absolutely necessary.

This sounds great, right? It’s nice to hear that we are all important. That we need each other in order to be Christian, to be part of the body of Christ. This is the stuff that makes for that quote I love so much from Herbert McCabe; I’ve repeated too many times, but that won’t stop me from doing it again—let me know if you get sick of it: “Christ is present to us insofar as we are present to one another.” Or there’s that famous quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer where he says the same sort of thing, but not as well: “Jesus Christ exists as a community.”

Or how about Karl Barth, he gets Paul right, and I like to quote him a lot too. I liked this quote so much I asked Monica if she would put it on the front of the bulletin. It’s right there in the front. He puts things so clearly, and provocatively: he says, “True Christianity cannot be a private Christianity, i.e., a rapacious Christianity…. Without one’s fellow-person, God is an illusion, a myth. He may be the God of Holy Scripture, and we may call upon Him as the Yahweh of Israel and the Father of Jesus Christ, but He is an idol in whom we certainly cannot believe” (CD IV.2: 442-443).

All this is exactly Paul’s insight into what Jesus came into our world to create: we participate in the body of Christ, the church, the people who gathered together for worship in Corinth, and those of us who get together here in Chapel Hill this evening. This is God’s creation; and somehow, mysteriously, we are made into Christ’s body. And everyone is vital to the body. No one is expendable; we can’t get along without each other. That’s the point. And it’s good news; it’s the gospel.

But there’s more; this good news goes deeper. Scholars have pointed out that Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth bears striking similarities with other Greco-Roman speeches and letters. It’s a type of writing and speaking that’s called a “concord”—homonoia in Greek. Politicians would give speeches or write letters trying to convince the diverse people of the city—polis is “city” in Greek, and that’s, obviously, where we get the notion of “politics”—to unite in the common project, to share the same goals for society, to share a common politics just as they share the same life in the polis, in the city.

And this is where we can see that Paul used the same discourse, the same way of speaking or writing. This is where it gets interesting—at least I think it is. In these “concord” addresses to the diverse population of the city, politicians called the society, the city, the polis, a body—just like Paul is doing in his letter to the divided church in Corinth. We are one body, politicians would say, so we need to act accordingly. We are one, united, bound together. And, of course, politicians only made these speeches when they needed to: that is, when a dissatisfied section of society wanted to revolt.

In this context, it almost sounds like Paul isn’t very original with this talk about the body. He was simply repeating what the other leaders said. But once we compare what Paul was saying in his talk about the body with what the politicians were saying about the body of the polis, the political body, then we can see what’s unique—the good news, the good newness that comes through Jesus Christ.

The politicians’ concord speeches were part of the protective ideology of the establishment, part of a project to protect the Empire, to keep the Empire and the city hierarchically ordered. A good example is a senator who needed to defuse the rebellious spirit of the lower classes, the poor working class, by saying that they were the necessary stomach of society: they did all the digestion work to provide nutrients to the head, the upper classes of society who didn’t work because they had more important things to worry about. The people assumed that the polis, the city, was hierarchically ordered. And that couldn’t be disturbed. Everything must stay the way it is. Some voices, by nature, were more politically relevant than others. So only a select few, the upper aristocratic classes, could provid the important leadership of the polis. The others, the masses, simply labored.

Now here’s where we can get the revolutionary politics of Paul. The good news for Paul is that Jesus came and established a society, a community, a people that he called a body, but a different political body than the secular order—that very different polis. And this new body is not hierarchically ordered; there is no protective ideology at work here; there is no concern to maintain the established order of things.

Now, let me read a chuck from the middle of our passage, verses 22-26: “those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable…But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”

This is the shape of Paul’s egalitarian politics, one where the weakest parts are actually the most important—it turns our vision of politics upside-down. And what’s more, each person bears the same suffering as every other; and that’s definitely not the way it works in the secular polis. This new body has a new politics. And it’s called church, the body of Christ.

Here, at our church, not one person has authority over another. There are no elected officials who are more politically important than any other. The only authority we have is this book, the Bible. As James McClendon, an important Baptist theologian always put it, we are people of the book—our peoplehood, our politics, is determined by this book, by the way we gather around to interpret it together. We gather around it every Sunday and hear from one another what the Holy Spirit may be saying to us about the good news of Jesus Christ.

And we learned how to be a people of the book from Israel. In our passage from Nehemiah we see all of Israel assemble around the reading of their Holy Scriptures. “And all the people listened attentively,” it says in 8:3. It’s the gathering around the book, the Holy Scriptures, the law of Moses that makes Israel a people, that gives them a political shape.

And that’s what we do when we come together here for church. We read the Bible, we pray the Scriptures, we sing the Scriptures in our hymns, someone gets up here and preaches the Scriptures (and hopefully it makes sense to the people listening), then we all respond to what we heard from the Bible, and finally we are commissioned to leave our gathering and continue to speak these Scriptures with our lives throughout our week.

Church is the place where we learn how to submit our whole lives to the authority of the Word of God. But here’s the difference between us and Israel. For us, the church, there are no priests. Or, I should say, there are no singular priests. The only priest we have, according to the book of Hebrews, is Jesus Christ. Instead of a singular priest, we believe in the priesthood of all believers—each of us is a priest, a vehicle of God’s Spirit, to one another.

Our political shape, the shape of this body of Christ, is deliberately egalitarian. We witness to the good news of Paul’s politics by the things we do here. That’s why, for example, a few different people got up earlier in the service to read the Bible. It wasn’t one person. And it wasn’t the same people that did it last week, and different people will read next week. That’s politics. And then the preacher—that’s me for today—gets up here and goes on and on about something from the bible passages, but then I have to sit down. I give up any authority I thought I had over the bible and someone else gets up here and asks all of us what we heard. That’s politics. It’s the political witness of the good news.

We listen together to what the Holy Spirit may be speaking to us from Scripture. I don’t have any more authority about what God may be saying to us than you do. And everyone will have a chance to speak—it doesn’t matter what class or race you come from, what kind of authority you may have in other places. That stuff doesn’t count here. When we come together, we assemble as the body of Christ, and we live out a different kind of politics—we embody a different way of being politically relevant.

Paul offers a completely different vision of politics than Jim Wallis’ book, God’s Politics. For Jim Wallis, Christians are political when they vote according to the right morals—when we choose the right representatives. Politics for him is still focused on the nation-state; it’s what some political theorists call “politics as state-craft.” We are politically relevant only when we use our convictions to make a difference for the nation-state. And Jim Wallis thinks he’s radical when he’s just offering another side of the same coin. In the end, he just wants Christians to be ok with voting for Democrats.

But that’s not radical. It’s more of the same. Paul’s politics is radical—it digs down to the root (that’s what the word radical means, getting to the origin or root) and plants something else; he plants the church as a different political body with different politics.

This is politics, Paul is saying. Our worship is the politics of the kingdom of God; it’s not primarily something that happens in the capitals, among the powerful. Our humble service is politics, our relation to one another in a very different political body, the body of Christ, a different kind of polis. This is what Augustine caught onto in the 4th century when he called the church the city of God, the alterna civitas, an alternate city.

And in this different city our politics, according to Paul, is determined by how we treat the weakest among us; it’s about if we provide space for the weakest among us to speak. It’s not about how much money you can raise to win a campaign. It’s not about how articulate you are. It’s not about who your friends are. It’s not about power, or success, or achievement. No, the weakest is the most honored.

This sermon is getting a little long, but there’s one more thing I need to say. It’s important to say because I can see how this way of thinking about the church’s political relevance can reinforce a certain sense of naval-gazing, an obsessive turn in our selves. If we are a political body, then what’s the point of participating in the politics of that other body, the secular body? Some people call it the sectarian temptation.

And I would say that we fall victim to that temptation when we forget that the very nature of the church is witness; we are evangelists; we always reach out; our political arrangement is always open ended. We don’t control the shape of our body; it belongs to God. We are determined by a politics that is always an open invitation—we have open borders. Anyone can walk in here and join our assembly, and they have a chance to speak. They are invited to help us understand what the Holy Spirit is saying through our Scriptures.

I wonder if we should think about our evangelism in terms of an immigration policy—we want other to become citizens, to join the people of God. It’s an immigration policy that doesn’t turn people away from joining us as we assemble as the body of Christ—exactly what we have done this evening. And the door remains open; it’s always open. Police don’t guard that door.

And the ministry of Jesus reveals something more about our evangelism, about our immigration policy. Maybe a good way to think about it is that Jesus links the immigration agency with the department of tourism—Jesus seeks out people to join his body.

And so should we. I mean, we are his body after all; we proclaim Jesus with our shared lives. And if we are called to be like Jesus, to offer the good news of Jesus Christ, then our body should open out—it should reach out—to the people Jesus did. And to whom does Jesus say he is coming to share the good news? It’s not the powerful; it’s not the people who can help pay the bills; it’s not those people who appear to have lots of resources. Apparently Jesus doesn’t now what’s best for his political career.

But at the very beginning of his ministry Jesus lays out his agenda, his political platform. He gives a framework that sheds light on the rest of his ministry. It’s a passage from Isaiah that shines onto the rest of his life. It helps us see him for who he was, and what he was about. And maybe, it’s also the way we can see who we are, to see how we can be identified with Christ’s body. Does our body look like his?
“The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found teh place where it is written:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down” (Luke 4:17-20).