(Cross posted on the blog of the Journal of Political Theology.)
In
the interest of full disclosure I’ll note at the outset that I am married to a
federal government employee. The idiotic faux crisis of the sequester, like its
recent precedents, is personal in our household. I read the end of the gospel
passage for this week and think, “hell, they’ve put plenty of manure around
this fig tree of Washington politics and it hasn’t produced fruit for years.
Let’s cut the damned thing down.”
The problem with
Washington politics is that nobody on the inside gets touched by the decisions
made here no matter which way they go. The only thing felt by the decision
makers is the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat in the great sport of
power politics.
No. That’s the wrong
metaphor, for what happens here is less like a game and more like an auction
or, perhaps a casino. There are still winners and losers, but victory goes not to
the winners of a game (which still implies a degree of merit) but rather to the
one who can pay the highest price. The folks in this town – lawmakers, pundits,
the entire insider class of powerbrokers – are perfectly content to eat the
finest foods and drink the finest wines their money and power can procure, and
they cannot conceive of the food and drink of which Isaiah speaks, much less
receive the invitation he articulates. Never mind the invitation that Jesus always
issues: “follow me.”
This is a nonpartisan,
or, better, a bipartisan rant (thinly disguised as a lectionary blog post).
While the Republicans bear an outsized share of the blame for the current political
paralysis, both sides continuously show a perfectly balanced willingness to
play politics with other peoples’ lives and livelihoods. Are today’s
Republicans worse sinners than the Democrats? Maybe yes, maybe no. But unless
all of us repent we will perish together.
Us? All of us? Well, yes. Along
with a million other households, we sit here anticipating the seemingly inevitable
furlough. While waiting to be victimized by the politics of the day it is incredibly
tempting and overwhelmingly easy to blame it all on the politicians. I can
recite that rant with the best of them!
That may be the biggest
temptation of them all: to place blame. The politicians do it all the time.
Blame for the deficit? It’s either the fault of the “takers” who receive
various government entitlements or the “makers” who do not pay their fair share
of taxes. I buy into that framing for one sentence for the sake of an easy
rhyme, but the blame game is far from poetic. Blame the previous
administration. Blame the banks. Blame the bureaucrats. Blame the
military-industrial complex. Blame corporations. Blame the Supreme Court. Blame
the pundits. Blame the president. Blame the one percent. Blame the 47 percent.
Nevertheless, the blame
for a politics that produces no fruit, that spends our money for that which is
not bread, and our labor for that which does not satisfy, falls on each of us. Blame
the one-hundred percent.
The blame falls on each
of us because politics is not reducible to the decision-making games of our dysfunctional
national political institutions. Politics properly understood, is always larger
than the squabbles between two parties beholden to moneyed interests. This must
be true, all the more so, if we imagine that politics has something to do, however
indirectly, with Jesus.
To practice the politics
of Jesus means setting aside narrow political concerns – the creation of fake
crises to win or lose – for a much broader understanding of politics. Politics,
where Jesus is involved, is about the ways that power is exercised in the city
for the purposes of justice and shalom. Such politics compels us to embody
grace always, because power gets exercised in the city not just during
Congressional contests, but in every single moment of every single day.
Take your daily bread,
for an example pertinent to our texts from Isaiah, the psalms and 1
Corinthians: without getting into the nitty gritty of food production,
processing and so on, it is enough to say that the entire food system and
agricultural economy is what it is – for better and for worse – because of the
ways that power gets exercised in the city.
The politics of Jesus
invites us to live each and every aspect of our lives with eyes wide open to
the realities of the exercise of power, and to pay particular attention to
those who are powerless or who are victims of power exercised without regard to
justice and shalom – for power exercised without regard to God’s steadfast love
(Psalm 63:3). The politics of Jesus is the embodiment of grace in the city –
and city means where ever human beings live and move and have their being.
The church is to be the
provisional embodiment of that grace lived out in community, and, therefore,
the place where we teach, learn, experiment with a politics that aspires to
reflect the head of the church. We embody grace in response to the grace that
has been freely given us (as Paul reminds again). In receiving grace, we are
called to respond in gratitude by living lives worthy of the calling we have
received with that grace.
And, of course, all
along the way we fall short, we are broken, we sin and we suffer.
The passage from Luke
this week insists on two crucial and interrelated truths: first, no matter our
politics or our faith, some things just happen to people. The fundamental truth
we are reminded of in Lent – we are dust and to dust we shall return – is dependent
neither on our political persuasion nor our moral turpitude. An accident at a
construction site (Siloam, perhaps) can bring the tower down on the sinners and
the saints. Hurricanes will wash away the good, the bad and the vast majority
of us who inhabit places along the continuum. God makes the rain to fall of the
just and the unjust. There is nothing of which to repent in the exigencies of
life.
Jesus refuses (in Luke,
but see also John 9:2) to make the easy connection between moral choice and
suffering. He eschews the blame game. Yet he insists on repentance.
Our failure to repent
still matters whenever, wherever and for whatever repentance is needed. It
remains, in fact, a matter of life and death, according to Jesus (Luke 13-3).
Without repentance we
cannot get beyond the gridlock of the present moment. We cannot get our minds
beyond (metanohte, or repent, in Luke 13:3) the present time.
We will continue to search merely for what can be purchased in the marketplace
and not seek that which, Isaiah suggests, can only be had in the economy of the
kingdom, beyond price, beyond sequester.
Interestingly, this word
of the moment in Washington has its roots in the Latin sequi , to follow. The Latin sequester likely meant follower. Perhaps Jesus really would
understand the politics of the present moment. I’m not saying that the
disciples had anything to do with the first sequester,
but I would suggest that if our current
politics involved a little more discipleship then those politics would involve
a lot less blame shifting and a lot more repentance.
