It has been more than a year since I suggested the Democrats could do worse than to align themselves with St. Matthew and start talking Gospel in an attempt to gain some high ground in the run-up to the 2008 presidential campaign.
After a year of church-going and pondering, I think in retrospect that was a mistake.
Mixing religion and politics is dangerous.
Remember, first time around, the hero was crucified and it took quite some time for authorities everywhere to stop slaughtering his followers.
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That was followed by turmoil that continues to this day. There still is a healthy slice of the world that believes the other healthy slice is going straight to hell, or at least should go straight to hell.
This is a good thing to keep in mind as the rhetoric grows about professing religion as part of a political persona and letting people know where you stand. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is among the latest to advocate that kind of public move.
I don’t think anymore that the Democrats should align themselves with St. Matthew.
I think we should all align ourselves–Christian, Jew, non-believer, whatever– with St. Matthew and take heed to the message sent in Chapter 25, Verses 31 through 46, which the Catholics label “The Judgment of the Nations.”
More on that in a minute.
I am not going to pretend here to have an evangelical gift.
I thought for quite some time that it might be good to go to divinity school and start taking all of this much more seriously. I have had the good fortune to develop friendships with some great priests, ex-priests, ministers of many different varieties.
What I like about them is that they are thoughtful, constantly pondering the challenges of what they have been called to do. I think what I want to say about this push for more expression of religion in public life is that, from my perspective, it is immensely difficult to be a Christian.
The standards are very high. There are doubts. There is sin.
And that might all be the easy part.
For the hard part, here’s Matthew’s report on what Jesus said about it.
“When the son of man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne. And all the nations will be assembled before him. And he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.”
The sheep on the right, this challenging Gospel says, will inherit the kingdom.
“For I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.”
The people described as righteous ask “When did we see you hungry?” and so on.
“Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.”
You will note there is nothing in this Gospel about whether people deserved to be clothed, fed, visited, nurtured, cared for. Jesus just says if you did it for the least (and that’s a very broad description that encompasses lots of circumstances) then you did it for me.
Do you have any idea of how difficult this is going to be? It’s not about religion. It’s about you and how you behave.
We love to have arguments about what should be OK in church.
How often do we argue about this simple Gospel and its complicated message?
A long time ago, when I was in a minor seminary, a gifted preacher came to visit. The seminary bosses lined us all up in a chapel, urged us to pray a bit and told us to listen.
“We are called to be other Christs,” the preacher said.
That may have been the point at which I decided, for whatever reason, I just couldn’t do it.
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Yes, indeed. That is Christianity boiled down. Other Christs.
It’s going to be a very difficult challenge to shift that into the political arena, where so much rhetoric is crudely informed, if informed at all, and the whole game feels a bit like blood sport.
Still, a good step would be to start sporting, “I’m with Matthew” T-shirts in a year or so, and knowing exactly what that means.