Recently two items reminded me of the importance of distinguishing the gospel from various socio-political agendas. 

 

First, Amy Greene recently wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times entitled “Campaigning to the Choir.” She talks about the invocation of Christian belief in the Tennessee gubernatorial race. But she recalls her own upbringing in the church (in Tennessee) and bemoans the manner of reduction faith undergoes in the political sphere. What had once been a rich, rooted source of identity that defied simplistic sloganeering had now become a farce – a kind of merit badge for politicians.

 

Second, in Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Gilead, the narrator recalls an argument between his father and grandfather – both ministers (the latter retired). The grandfather had led the men from his Kansas church away to fight in the Civil War. Even before the war, he had been a militant abolitionist – apparently involved with John Brown’s Pottawatomie Massacre.  But most of the men from his congregation died; and he was left with bitterness as his congregation died off, and the Southern states were not (in his estimation) dealt the hand of judgment they deserved. Here’s their exchange when the grandfather turns up on Sunday evening after he leaving during the father’s sermon:

 

            He appeared at the house after dinner. He walked into the kitchen where my mother and I were clearing things away and cut himself a piece of bread and was about to leave again without a single word to us. But my father came up the porch steps just then and stood in the doorway, watching him.

            “Reverend,” my grandfather said when he saw him.

            My father said, “Reverend.”

            My mother said, “It’s Sunday. It’s the Lord’s Day. It’s the Sabbath.”

            My father said, “We are all well aware of that.” But he didn’t step out of the doorway. So she said to my grandfather, “Sit down and I’ll fix a plate for you. You can’t get by on a piece of bread.”

            And he did sit down. So my father came in and sat down across from him. They were silent for some time.

            Then my father said, “Did my sermon offend you in some way? Those few words you heard of it?”

            The old man shrugged. “Nothing in it to offend. I just wanted to hear some preaching. So I went over to the Negro church.”

            After a minute my father asked, “Well, did you hear some preaching?”

            My grandfather shrugged. “The text was ‘Love your enemies.’”

            “That seems to me to be an excellent text in the circumstances,” my father said. This was just after somebody set that fire behind the church that I mentioned earlier.

            The old man said, “Very Christian.”

            My father said, “You sound disappointed, Reverend.”

            My grandfather put his head in his hands. He said, “Reverend, no words could be bitter enough, no day could be long enough. There is just no end to it. Disappointment. I eat and drink it. I wake and sleep it.”

            My father’s lips were white. He said, “Well, Reverend, I know you placed great hope in that war. My hopes are in peace, and I am not disappointed. Because peace is its own reward. Peace is its own justification.”

            My grandfather said, “And that’s just what kills my heart, Reverend. That the Lord never came to you. That the seraphim never touched a coal to your lips –”

            My father stood up from his chair. He said, “I remember when you walked to the pulpit in that shot-up, bloody shirt with that pistol in your belt. And I had a thought as powerful and clear as any revelation. And it was, This has nothing to do with Jesus. Nothing. Nothing. And I was, and I am, as certain of that as anyone could ever be of any so-called vision. I defer to no in this. Not to you, not to Paul the Apostle, not to John the Divine. Reverend.”[1]

 

The scene bristles with anger masked by formality. Here the gospel was not reduced; rather, it was filled with a complex set of hopes which had only some distance relationship to the hope of the gospel. If the current Tennessee gubernatorial race is a farce, this gospel is a monstrosity. It could not be simply mentioned in passing. It stirred the soul of those who bought into it, and for that reason it was much more dangerous form. Tangential values had been brought into the center of the gospel and hitched to entities which could not possibly bear the weight of the infinite and eternal.

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