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by The Rev. Dr. Jim Antal
August/September 2008
Between now and the presidential election, who will you trust to guide you as you form your opinion about the candidate who will receive your vote? Perhaps your favorite op-ed writer. What about the barrage of TV ads? Will you watch the debates? Go to web sites to hear the candidates’ speeches? What about blogs? Are the party conventions an important source?
For the first two or three hundred years after the Pilgrims landed, people looked to their local pastors for analysis, perspective and wisdom as election time approached. For the past thirty years, the loudest Christian voices in the public square have portrayed the Christian faith in ideologically narrow terms, projecting their own biases as an expression of God’s vision. It remains a mystery to me why mainline Christians have mostly stood idly by during this time.
Because of this, when the topic of “election sermons” comes up, many assume it refers to using the pulpit as a means of advocating a specific ideological position. But as Prof. Mark Burrows points out elsewhere in this issue, our Reformed tradition is committed to safeguarding and promoting the common good. In a time when the news media and the campaigns themselves often seek to sharpen the distinctions among candidates by amplifying their ideological distinctiveness, an election sermon can remind our congregants that among Christians, chief among our many concerns is our concern for the common good.
1988 was the first election year I served a local church. Having come to Newton from being a member at Riverside Church, I shared Harry Emerson Fosdick’s view that in any democracy, what emerges are the extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people. And with my former pastor, William Sloan Coffin, I believed that “although the truth will make you free, it will first make you miserable!”1
I reminded my congregation not to expect from politics what only God, and the faithful witness of God’s people, can deliver. And yet, by leaving salvation up to God, I in no way justified a lack of involvement in the political system. I shared with them Fosdick’s insight concerning Jesus’ exhortation from the book of Acts, “You shall be my witnesses.” There, and throughout the Gospel, Jesus makes a direct appeal to our representative capacity, as if to say: “You can be more than yourselves; you have the power to stand for high principles; you can act in such a way that people identify you with something greater than yourself. I want you to exercise that power. You shall be my witnesses.”
Inspired by this, even the least of us can stand for the greatest things. Each of us can bring to the voting booth a sense of Christian responsibility.
In a much more conservative congregation in Ohio, I discovered that 52 years earlier, one of my predecessors had preached an election sermon when Eisenhower and Stevenson sought our country’s highest office. My suspicion is that most UCC local pastors could find precedent in the history of their congregation’s pulpit. And I’m sure that every congregation would be intrigued to learn more about such an unexpected piece of history.
Two months before the election, I found it helpful to ask my congregation to email me materials that they thought might be helpful as I shaped my election sermon. One person quoted the former Executive Minister for Justice and Witness Ministries, Bernice Powell Jackson: “Politics is about the values we honor, the dollars we allocate, and the process we follow so that we can live together with some measure of justice, order and peace.” This provided a nice counterpoint to the quotations which others had suggested from Machevelli and Clausewitz.
In the five election sermons I crafted, I never endorsed a candidate, and rarely mentioned them. Instead, I kept in mind President Lincoln’s sober concern: In the great election contests, our task is to worry earnestly whether or not we are on God’s side.2 What matters to God? What themes emerge from scripture that could form the basis for evaluating a candidate?
If I had to limit myself to three questions I would use to assess the candidates’ records and proposals, I would begin by asking how each of the candidates uphold God’s concern for “the least of these among us.” Secondly, because God urges us to enlarge our unit of care and concern beyond self-interest and promote the common good, I would ask which candidate will advance the common good, regardless of the impact of those proposals on me. Finally, because God calls us to be stewards of the earth and all that dwells therein, I would ask which candidate will offer the courageous leadership needed to extend the relevant unit of survival from the boundaries of our nation to the earth as a whole, and extend the relevant time frame from the quarterly reports of corporations to the ancient measure of the seventh generation.
While these aren’t the only questions, they provide a faithful filter – perhaps a little larger than the eye of a needle – through which a worthy candidate might emerge.
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1 WS Coffin, sermon, 9/30/84
2 Basler, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol 5, pp. 403-404.