Preaching Politics

Reflections on the Lectionary for Epiphany and Baptism of Jesus

The Adoration of the Magi, by Edward Burne-Jones, 1904. Image in the public domain, taken from Wikipedia.

Recently a friend told me about the feedback from a sermon she preached. Everyone was complimentary about the things she had said, and they thought she had done a good job. But a few folks also mentioned, as an aside, that she had put a lot of politics into the sermon. They didn’t necessarily offer it as a criticism, but just as an observation. But as anyone who has ever received that kind of observation knows, there’s probably a criticism embedded in it too. Nobody puts “politics” and “preaching” together in the same sentence without having some feelings about it, one way or another, and nobody mentions politics to a preacher in a comment about their sermon without wanting the preacher to feel, on some level, that the preacher had approached or crossed some kind of line.

I admit to being irritated by this kind of thing—by people who complain about politics in sermons, but more than that, by the very idea that a sermon is, or should be, a politics-free zone. I know that it’s a kind of orthodoxy in some circles, that a sermon ought to steer clear of anything political, and that preachers shouldn’t connect their messages to the political realm. But I think that perspective is both bad and impossible.

I say that it’s both bad and impossible because of the basic way I think about preaching. For me, as someone in the Christian tradition, a sermon is about interpreting a particular text from the Christian biblical tradition in light of the life of a particular community (a congregation). Obviously there are nuances to that, and exceptions to those circumstances, but I think this pattern is basically true across many different contexts. The text and the community are two legs of a table, and the preacher is the third leg, and together they hold the whole thing up. That means that in by definition in a sermon the preacher is interested the world that the community lives in, and the world that the text lived (and lives) in. Neither community nor text (nor preacher) can be abstracted from context, like some free-floating thing, disconnected from everything else. The community (the people in the pews) are people with bodies who live in the world, and the text is a thing with history and a past. The preacher’s job is to interpret them together.

Because the community (the congregation) is made up of human beings, “avoiding politics” wouldn’t be possible, even if it were desirable. The act of gathering in a group like a congregation is political. The act of speaking is political. Truth-claims like those made by religions are political. Having a building where a group gathers is political. Deciding whether to wear jeans or something dressier to church is political. Your church’s sign is political. Your church’s lawn care and landscaping are political. An apolitical religion is not possible, since religions and congregations are made up of people and people live in the world. A supposedly apolitical stance is political; to try not to choose sides is to choose sides.

The biblical texts themselves are political too. This weekend is a busy one in the liturgical calendar, with two major milestones of the church year popping up: the Epiphany, and the Baptism of Jesus. Epiphany happens on January 6^th (itself now a political date!), and this year the Baptism of Jesus falls on January 7^th. Probably some congregations will celebrate one, and others the other, and some might choose to combine the two. In trying to decide which one to choose for illustrating my point about politics and preaching, I realized that both sets of texts (linked above), like all biblical texts, work really well as examples of the political nature of biblical texts.

Let’s say you choose the Epiphany texts. The first reading for Epiphany is Isaiah 60:1-6, which is about Israel’s place among “the nations,” the neighboring peoples. The place of Israel among the nations is a major preoccupation of Isaiah, and indeed a big concern for most of the prophets. Biblical prophecy is an inherently political genre. The Psalm for Epiphany is 72:1-7 and 10-14, about kingship, land, oppression, and again, the nations. That’s deeply political. Or look at the epistle; Ephesians 3:1-12 begins with Paul’s announcement of his imprisonment. There are few things more political than prison, and any letter written with that in view is always going to have a political edge to it. And finally, the gospel reading for Epiphany is the story of the magi traveling to see Jesus after his birth. There are so many political aspects to this story that it is difficult to imagine avoiding politics in any interpretation of it. There are nations and territories, kings and messiahs, prophecies, and threats of violence. The whole story hinges on the plot of a jealous king against a supposed upstart usurper, and even if you do a thoroughly theological reading and ignore all of that, you’re still left with a story that highlights foreigners with a lot of prestige (the magi) traveling to visit a Judean child with great promise. All biblical texts are political for the same reason that all human life is; they come from a place and a time and they presuppose the conditions of those places and times.

Or, say you choose the Baptism of Jesus texts. The first of those readings is Genesis 1:1-5, which is the very famous “In the beginning” text that figures prominently not only in theological discussions but also in popular imagination, showing up in citations across literature and film and television. Genesis 1 also a flaming battleground of the culture wars; creationism is part of the fundamentalist Christian movement and has made its way into science and history curricula, discussions of government funding, and more. There is no easy way to read that kind of a text apolitically. The Psalm for that day, Psalm 29, might seem to be a straightforward recounting of creation. But notice how the Psalm links the natural world inextricably to the political world. It’s not just cedars that the Psalmist considers, it’s the cedars of Lebanon. It’s not just wilderness, it’s the wilderness of Kadesh. The world, for the biblical text, is organized politically. The third text for that day, Acts 19:1-7, follows Pauls’ journeys through Greece, a place where he was a stranger, where he encountered deities and practices that were foreign to him, and where in this text he has to issue a gentle correction to the practices of another Jesus-follower. Finally, the passage from Mark, 1:4-11, is the story of Jesus’ baptism by John, at the Jordan River. It can be difficult to recognize, amidst all the Christian traditions of baptism, what a radical scene this is. John is depicted as a charismatic figure in the mold of the prophets, doing a ritual remittance of sins. The prophets were almost always political, and sin is too, and as the gospel narratives would go on to bear out, John’s life and career were deeply embedded in politics. (The king doesn’t personally seek you out and execute you for nothing, usually). The fact that this was happening at the Jordan, a historical and narrative boundary of Israel, raised the stakes of the encounter.

All of these texts are political, which makes the injunction to keep politics out of the pulpit next to impossible. But, again, even if it were possible to read and interpret these texts without politics—even if you could cut out the political parts and ignore them—you’re still stuck with the fact that preaching is an inherently social and therefore political act. Preaching has an audience, and audiences are made up of people, and there’s no escaping that. Even if you somehow successfully excised the politics from the texts, you can never excise the embodied existences of the people who are hearing it, or the person who is saying it.

So, to me, the question is not whether preaching is or ought to be political. It is always political, and it has to be, and it ought to be. To interpret and proclaim biblical texts in an apolitical way is to do violence to the texts themselves; it cuts out some of the most important parts. For me, the question instead is what kind of politics find their way into your sermons. That will vary from person to person and from congregation to congregation, and that is probably what people are objecting to—or at least noticing—when they point out that there are politics in a sermon. There are ways to preach that bolster the status quo, that reinforce prejudices and injustices, and that protect harmful behaviors. And there are ways to preach that put politics in view, and ask us to pay attention to how our lives intersect with larger systems of power and control. I happen to think that the second way, preaching to help us see ourselves in a larger context, is the best way to do it. I think that that kind of politics should always be a part of sermons, in one way or another. The question is not whether there are politics, but what kind they are, and how they show up.