Vicar's Voice - 22nd Sunday after Pentecost 2024
We give thanks for the right to vote
and the opportunity to hold this privilege and responsibility
with the care and awareness it merits.
Help us to realize that our vote matters and that it is an act of faith.
God, our creator, guide us in truth and love.
- from "Litany for an Election" by Rev. Shannon Kelly, Director Department of Faith Formation, The Episcopal Church
It is not that we clergy and lay leaders and preachers do not have strong beliefs, attitudes, and values that guide us, but we recognize that our churches have wonderfully broad and diverse perspectives held by our congregants. This broad swath of understanding means that we each have very strong reasons for holding the positions that we hold. We are the sum of our life experiences, and each life is distinctive and different from every other life. We must not carelessly or hastily judge another but strive to understand why someone is the way they are.
However, this does not mean that our faith and our moral actions are purely subjective. In spite of our individual lives, we have embraced Christianity as our faith, having been embraced ourselves by God's love and forgiveness manifested in Christ and energized through the Spirit. God is in all of Creation, which, naturally, includes our public life. We cannot help but be guided by that faith in all that we do, and that includes the exercising of our responsibility and right to vote.
Walter Brueggemann, theologian and critic, reminds us that the rule of law is essential to our civic life, and that in our lives, both secular and sacred, the norm of the law is justice. Justice requires that we recognize that we are equal and those in power show restraint not to unfairly wield that power. Justice also entails generosity, where abundance flows to scarcity.
Bruegemman uses a frame of the Epistles of Paul to outline how we might assess candidates and policies we are invited to consider at the polls. He asserts that Paul reminds us that when we look at policies and candidates, we keep in mind a frame of preferring hospitality over hostility, generosity over parsimony (stinginess in allocating money), and forgiveness over vengeance. The triad of hostility/parsimony/vengeance, says Bruegemman, "...creates an environment of fear in which we never stop brooding about affronts, and in which we choose candidates and policies that are excessively self-protecting, while evoking conflict and alienation..." The opposite triad, that of hospitality/generosity/forgiveness "...tilts forward in hope and a new social possibility." (https://churchanew.org/brueggemann/anticipating-the-election)
Of course, there is no candidate or party that fully projects either triad - there are positive and challenging positions in every platform and in every person running for office. But we, like Paul as faithful followers of Christ, can exhibit positive traits and allow those traits to inform our decisions. As Christians we can embody a "...welcoming well-being that specializes in human dignity, human security, and human justice."
May we always and in all ways courageously carry the Cross: Magnanimeter Crucem Sustine.
In Christ,
Fr. Shawn
It is not that we clergy and lay leaders and preachers do not have strong beliefs, attitudes, and values that guide us, but we recognize that our churches have wonderfully broad and diverse perspectives held by our congregants. This broad swath of understanding means that we each have very strong reasons for holding the positions that we hold. We are the sum of our life experiences, and each life is distinctive and different from every other life. We must not carelessly or hastily judge another but strive to understand why someone is the way they are.
However, this does not mean that our faith and our moral actions are purely subjective. In spite of our individual lives, we have embraced Christianity as our faith, having been embraced ourselves by God's love and forgiveness manifested in Christ and energized through the Spirit. God is in all of Creation, which, naturally, includes our public life. We cannot help but be guided by that faith in all that we do, and that includes the exercising of our responsibility and right to vote.
Walter Brueggemann, theologian and critic, reminds us that the rule of law is essential to our civic life, and that in our lives, both secular and sacred, the norm of the law is justice. Justice requires that we recognize that we are equal and those in power show restraint not to unfairly wield that power. Justice also entails generosity, where abundance flows to scarcity.
Bruegemman uses a frame of the Epistles of Paul to outline how we might assess candidates and policies we are invited to consider at the polls. He asserts that Paul reminds us that when we look at policies and candidates, we keep in mind a frame of preferring hospitality over hostility, generosity over parsimony (stinginess in allocating money), and forgiveness over vengeance. The triad of hostility/parsimony/vengeance, says Bruegemman, "...creates an environment of fear in which we never stop brooding about affronts, and in which we choose candidates and policies that are excessively self-protecting, while evoking conflict and alienation..." The opposite triad, that of hospitality/generosity/forgiveness "...tilts forward in hope and a new social possibility." (https://churchanew.org/brueggemann/anticipating-the-election)
Of course, there is no candidate or party that fully projects either triad - there are positive and challenging positions in every platform and in every person running for office. But we, like Paul as faithful followers of Christ, can exhibit positive traits and allow those traits to inform our decisions. As Christians we can embody a "...welcoming well-being that specializes in human dignity, human security, and human justice."
May we always and in all ways courageously carry the Cross: Magnanimeter Crucem Sustine.
In Christ,
Fr. Shawn