FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ATLANTA, GEORGIA

Sermon by Dr. George Bryant Wirth

 

April 27, 2008

 

CHRIST AT THE CENTER: OUR FIRM FOUNDATION

GOD AND POLITICS

 

Scripture:  Psalm 33:1-12, Matthew 22:15-22, Romans 13:1-7

 

I

 

In 1972, as a brand new youth pastor right out of seminary, called into ministry with teenagers and their families in the Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church outside of Philadelphia, I confess to you that I registered as a Democrat just a few months before the November presidential election.

 

You will remember that Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew were the Republican candidates running against George McGovern and Sargent Shriver as the Democrats.  I was younger then, and like many in my generation who opposed the Viet Nam War, McGovern was the candidate we decided to vote for.  During the fervor of that presidential race, in my enthusiasm, I put a large McGovern poster on the inside of my church office door, which turned out to be a big mistake.

 

One of the parents of a ninth grade student came in to talk about the confirmation class program, and when she saw the McGovern poster, that mother gasped, shook her head, then turned around and walked out again.  I was advised not long after by a member of the Personnel Committee that I was free to vote for anyone in the election, but the McGovern poster was no longer an option.  And that was my first lesson as a Presbyterian pastor regarding God and Politics – “Do not let your own political views alienate the people who sit in the pews.”

 

Five years later, we moved across Pennsylvania to Sewickley in suburban Pittsburgh where I became the preacher of The Presbyterian Church in that town.  Jimmy Carter, a Democrat from Georgia, was in the White House, but I discovered in the fall of 1977 that Mr. Frank Stoner, a Republican from Pennsylvania, was in the church house.

 

He was an elder in our congregation, stood six feet, four inches tall and was the chairman of the Republican Party from our district.  The polling station was located in our fellowship hall, and that first Tuesday in November, when I walked in to register, there was Frank Stoner looking at me with a discerning eye.

 

The voting machines for the Democrats were to the left and for the Republicans to the right, and with a slight degree of hesitation, I (in the words of Robert Frost) “I took the road less traveled,” and joined the Grand Old Party, which pleased Frank Stoner and the many Republicans who belonged to that congregation.

 

So the second lesson I learned about how to navigate in the turbulent waters of God and Politics was: “Try to identify with the majority, but don’t ignore the minority opinion.”

 

When the Wirth family moved to Atlanta in 1990 to join this great church, having learned my lessons from two previous congregations, I decided never again to tell anyone which party I belong to, nor to declare which candidates I vote for in any election.  In fact, I have tried to be non-partisan about God and Politics for the past 18 years – because standing up here, I have the responsibility to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ without taking unfair advantage and making this a “Bully Pulpit” to impose my political views on any of you.

 

II

 

Now with all of that said, I think there are some other lessons which all of us across this nation are learning today as we make our way through the 2008 Presidential Campaign, and the first is this: God is not a Republican or a Democrat.

 

That was and is a central theme in Jim Wallis’ two books which have caught the attention of Americans over the past three years: “God’s Politics,” published in 2005 which became a New York Times bestseller, and “The Great Awakening” which just came out and is now available in book stores including our own.

 

Wallis, who preached from this pulpit several years ago, is a Conservative Evangelical Christian with a progressive political point of view and an agenda for justice and equality which he says needs to be renewed in this country.

 

In fact, Wallis believes that we are living through a major transition in America, leading toward spiritual revival and political reconciliation.  In his first book, Wallis writes:

 

          “Neither religious nor secular fundamentalism can save us, but a new spiritual revival that ignites deep social conscience could transform our society…Most important of all is the spiritual power of hope, which may be the only thing that can finally overcome our…(divisions and) cynicism.”  (From “God’s Politics” by Jim Wallis, Harper San Francisco, 2005, page 7)

 

And in his most recent book, Wallis goes on to say:

 

          “Such a revival of faith applied to our most significant social and public challenges…shows the capacity to bring people together – even across political boundaries and divisions…to find common ground and move us to higher ground.”  (From “The Great Awakening,” Harper Collins, 2008, page 4)

 

God knows, we surely need that kind of revival and reconciliation today.  This presidential election, which at one point included a Mormon (Romney), a Roman Catholic (Giuliani), three Southern Baptists (Clinton, Huckabee and McCain), a Methodist (Edwards) and a member of the United Church of Christ (Obama), who also reflect the wide diversity of race, gender, economic backgrounds and different political ideologies – all of those candidates have narrowed down to three front runners who left the starting gate on the “high road” of civil discourse, but are now being pushed toward the “low road” of negative advertising and personally criticizing and attacking one another in painful ways.

 

A friend of mine, a political analyst who is involved in politics in this state, said to me the other day, “Anybody who runs for public office today has got to know his or her life will be an open book.  So if you want to run for public office, you have to decide at the age of five and then live accordingly.”

 

What we need, says Jim Wallis and many more voices alongside him, is spiritual revival and reconciliation.  And if we agree that God is not a Republican or a Democrat, but rather a loving and forgiving God who wants and wills the best for all the people, then we as Christians are called to advocate for civility and integrity in this election, and cannot participate in the hostility that drags us down in the opposite direction.

 

If we believe, as Jesus said, that A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand (Mark 3:24), then our role as people of faith is to work and to pray for healing and for hope across this land.

 

Abraham Lincoln believed that, and he staked his life on it.  Doris Kearns Goodwin, in her Pulitzer Prize winning book “Team of Rivals,” describes Lincoln’s extraordinary ability and deep conviction to forgive and collaborate with those who opposed and tried to ruin him instead of retaliating against them.  I think one quote in particular holds significant meaning for us right now:

 

          “In great contests, each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God… (But) God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.  In the present Civil War, it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party…”  (From “Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Simon and Schuster, 2005, page 479)

 

Abraham Lincoln said that, and that purpose, God’s purpose, is the same now as it has always been: reconciliation among people of every race, color, creed and all the nations…and yes, reconciliation between candidates and political parties in this presidential election.  So the first lesson is this: God is not a Republican or a Democrat.

 

III

 

Consider a second lesson we are trying to learn about God and Politics today: The separation of church and state was never intended as a mandate to remove God from the public life of this country.

 

Most of know that the phrase “The wall of separation between church and state” is not in the Constitution, but these words from the First Amendment are included there:  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

 

Taken together, those important statements make it clear that our founders wanted to draw a boundary line here in America between the government and the communities of faith.  Why?  Because most of them had come from England and other parts of Europe where the monarchs and lawmakers ruled over the church, and our founders resolved that would not be repeated again in this new and emerging nation.

 

Now the concept for that wall of separation came from the Protestant Reformation.  According to Stephen Carter, a law professor at Yale University and the author of  this book, “God’s Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics” (published by Basic Books, 2000):

 

          “The true origin of the metaphor (wall of separation) does not lie with Thomas Jefferson’s coinage, which occurred over a decade after the First Amendment was adopted.  Rather its origin is in Protestant theology.

          Indeed, (imbedded) in the Reformation was the idea that God had created not one but two forms of authority, the spiritual and the temporal, each with its own sphere of…power.  The Reformers believer that God was sovereign over both and that both (the church and the state) were required to exercise power in accordance with God’s law; nevertheless, their purposes were quite different, the one to prepare people’s souls for salvation, the other to maintain order in the material world.”  (“God’s Name in Vain,” page 75)

 

But what many of us have forgotten is that long before the First Amendment was added to the Constitution, long before “the wall of separation between church and state” was affirmed in this nation, and fifteen hundred years before the Protestant Reformation, the Apostle Paul in his Letter to the Romans said: Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God… (Romans 13:1)

 

Jesus weighed in on the same subject with words taken from Matthew 22, our gospel text for today.  Speaking to those first century religious leaders, when they asked Him a trick question about paying taxes to the political leader of the Roman Empire, Jesus took a coin of the realm into His hand and answered them this way:  Whose head is this, and whose title?  They said The emperor’s.  And turning it over from one side to the other, Jesus declared Then give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.

 

You see, the true origin of the separation between church and state is found in the Bible, giving God the ultimate authority over everything that He has made.

 

What concerned and disturbed Stephen Carter so much that he decided to write this book, is the modern day misinterpretation of what was envisioned by our founders in the late 18th century.  Carter calls it “an historical fantasy - that it was - the power of religion, not the power of the state, that the founders so feared that they wrote a clause about religion into the First Amendment.”  (Carter, ibid, page 72)

 

Not so, says Carter.  And as we read the documents and remember our history, we will discover that just the opposite is true.  The founders wanted religion to be set free in this country, and they never would have imagined that God’s presence or the practice of faith could or should be removed from our public life in these United States.

 

CONCLUSION

 

Which leads to one final lesson that we Christians need to discern and to affirm: It is not God’s purpose for us to dominate any election, to negate other religions, or to equate a conservative or liberal label of faith as the litmus test for whoever will become our next President.

 

Two months ago, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released the statistical findings from their U.S. Religious Landscape survey, including these numbers: 96% of the American voters believe in God, 51% describe themselves as Protestants (including Presbyterians), and 44% call themselves “Born Again” or “Evangelical” Christians (From USA Today article “American Faith: A Work in Progress,” March 10, 2008, page 11A).  So without a doubt, we are still the majority faith community in America.

 

Therefore, in keeping with our Biblical and Reformed Tradition, it is important for us to proclaim what we believe, and not to be ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  But it is equally essential for us to practice what Jesus preached: humility instead of self-righteousness, hospitality instead of indifference, compassion instead of rejection, love instead of fear, hope instead of despair, and reconciliation instead of retaliation.

 

That is the kind of witness God wants us to make to this nation, and that is what it will take to bring us together as Americans.  United we stand, divided we fall – Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord (Psalm 33:12).

 

And with just six months to go before the election, let us continue to pray for Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain and their families, as those presidential candidates seek to serve their God and this great country.

 

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

 

 

 

 

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