Political Diversity is Honest Witness

Transcript

Rick Barry: Have you ever told a lie about something because it’s easier than telling the truth? Explaining the truth would take more time than you have, or it would take more effort than you want to give, or it would make you more uncomfortable than you want to be?

Let me know in the comments. Because today, we’re gonna talk about how being part of a politically diverse Christian community helps us explain Jesus more honestly and coherently to the people around us.

Jesus said that the entirety of the Old Testament is a description of who he would be, why he would come to us, and what he was coming to do. When we read the Old Testament that way, as a catalogue of what Jesus cares about and what he’s going to do, it changes the way we look at Jesus. And it changes the story we’re trying to tell about him.

The Old Testament authors talked about every aspect of the public square: art, economics, agriculture, environmental protection, poverty relief, public health, international relations, criminal justice. The list goes on and on. But they also approached every problem in every one of those arenas from multiple angles.

Let’s just use poverty and food insecurity as an example.

The Old Testament offers up a pretty wide range of ways to deal with food insecurity. In Egypt, Joseph, led by prophetic dreams, institutes a tax-and-sale system, where he has the state collect a fifth of all the grain that gets grown, warehouses it, and then sells it back in times of famine.

When Israel was wandering in the desert, God’s strategy for dealing with food insecurity was to give Israel quail and a daily crop of manna—and strict rules about how much each person could collect.

After Israel was established as a permanent political settlement, we didn’t just see one approach to the problem—we saw this same problem being approached from a range of different angles all at the same time:

They had gleaning laws that limited how much of your farmland you could harvest. Land owners were required to leave some of their field unharvested so that people who were hungry or impoverished could collect what was left.

Israelites were required to regularly offer up multiple tithes, one of which was a tithe to support the poor.

There were laws about trading fairly and charging fair prices in the marketplace. 

A lot of the laws about sacrifices and offerings in Leviticus were actually presented on a sliding scale, so that no one had to go hungry for the sake of offering the required sacrifices. 

And the Year of Jubilee was supposed to function as a regular cadence of large-scale debt forgiveness and land redistribution, designed to ensure that families, clans and tribes would always have enough land and resources to stay fed. 

And all of these laws were ON TOP of pervasive, established cultural norms that promoted hospitality and generosity.

So, what does all of this have to do with our churches?

Well, Christians are called to live as ambassadors of Christ, and we’re called to serve as his body in this world, his manifested physical presence. 

And I don’t care how high-functioning you are, no one, absolutely none of us, is able to actually care about everything that the Bible says Jesus cares about. 

No one is able to work on everything the Bible says Jesus is going to fix. None of us are able to put our hands on every wound the Bible says that Jesus wants to heal.

The only way our gatherings of Jesus’ body—the only way our churches can be gatherings of people who, together, demonstrate Jesus’ desire to wrap his arms around our broken places the way a mother hen wraps her wings around her chicks is for our churches to be communities of people who celebrate the fact that we have different political priorities from one another.

We should be RELIEVED that, in the church, different people prioritize different problems. We should be RELIEVED that people in the church who prioritize the same problem can still come at it from different angles. We should be relieved, because when that happens, it takes the burden off of each of us to individually do everything ourself!

If our churches are embodying that healthy kind of political diversity we talked about a few videos ago, then each of us gets to go into whatever opportunities we can find to promote healing and witness…while trusting and knowing that there are other people who have our back. People who are seizing on opportunities to promote healing and witness in places where we’d never be welcomed or heard.

If our church is politically uniform, it’s giving the impression that Jesus came to get a specific party elected, a specific platform passed, a specific policy goal enacted. It makes it look like he only came to deal with one particular problem, in one specific way, instead of healing and restoring and reconciling everything that’s broken about humanity and our world, in every way that that brokenness is felt.

If our church is politically uniform, we are embodying a lie about Jesus, telling the people around us that he’s smaller and more parochial and less capable and less relevant and less sympathetic to the suffering of fewer people than he actually is.

And that’s just not a lie I think any of us want to be telling.