A Christian in the Voting Booth, Part 3: History Has Its Eyes on You

 

Service of Worship

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

Sunday, October 25, 2020

Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor

Let us pray:

Prayer for the Election Year of a President

God of mercy, our nation is in a time of great transition.
With all of the injustice and fear in our world today,
we ask you to inspire us and guide us as we participate in the upcoming presidential elections.
We seek a government that upholds and protects human rights and justice for all its citizens,
regardless of race, class, gender, or religion.
Move and inspire us by your presence among us in the most vulnerable in our society.
For their tears are your tears, their pain is your pain, their suffering is your suffering.
In gratitude for the right to vote, we pray.

- Anna Misleh

 

Deuteronomy 34: 1-12

The Death of Moses

34 Then Moses climbed Mount Nebo from the plains of Moab to the top of Pisgah, across from Jericho. There the Lord showed him the whole land—from Gilead to Dan, ² all of Naphtali, the territory of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Mediterranean Sea, ³ the Negev and the whole region from the Valley of Jericho, the City of Palms, as far as Zoar. ⁴ Then the Lord said to him, “This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob when I said, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ I have let you see it with your eyes, but you will not cross over into it.”

⁵ And Moses the servant of the Lord died there in Moab, as the Lord had said. ⁶ He buried him^[a] in Moab, in the valley opposite Beth Peor, but to this day no one knows where his grave is. ⁷ Moses was a hundred and twenty years old when he died, yet his eyes were not weak nor his strength gone. ⁸ The Israelites grieved for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days, until the time of weeping and mourning was over.

⁹ Now Joshua son of Nun was filled with the spirit^[b] of wisdom because Moses had laid his hands on him. So the Israelites listened to him and did what the Lord had commanded Moses.

¹⁰ Since then, no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, ¹¹ who did all those signs and wonders the Lord sent him to do in Egypt—to Pharaoh and to all his officials and to his whole land. ¹² For no one has ever shown the mighty power or performed the awesome deeds that Moses did in the sight of all Israel.

 

Matthew 22: 34-46

The Greatest Commandment

³⁴ Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. ³⁵ One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: ³⁶ “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

³⁷ Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’^[a] 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. ³⁹ And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’^[b] 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Whose Son Is the Messiah?

⁴¹ While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them, ⁴² “What do you think about the Messiah? Whose son is he?”

“The son of David,” they replied.

⁴³ He said to them, “How is it then that David, speaking by the Spirit, calls him ‘Lord’? For he says,

⁴⁴ “‘The Lord said to my Lord:
    “Sit at my right hand
until I put your enemies
    under your feet.”’^[c]

⁴⁵ If then David calls him ‘Lord,’ how can he be his son?” ⁴⁶ No one could say a word in reply, and from that day on no one dared to ask him any more questions.

 

A Message

“A Christian in the Voting Booth, Part 3: History Has Its Eyes on You”

Friends, as we barrel closer and closer to election day, what I’ve been thinking about is campaign slogans. We’ve had a long standing prevailing belief in the United States that the average voter has a very short attention span, and remains undecided for much of the race. When you combine these 2 ideas together, you end up with candidates who put little emphasis on debates, big speeches, and a sound platform, and great emphasis on soundbites. You end up with candidates who come up with a short, catchy phrase and print it on a bunch of red hats. Lest you think I’m picking on you know who, I’m not. This practice goes back a long, long way in American campaign history. I did some research this week and uncovered memorable campaign slogans from decades past that I’m sure you will recognize, too. Some of these candidates were successful, some weren’t. But they made an impression on us, and it’s interesting to examine why.

 

Some of our candidates went with rhyming: I Like Ike!

Some preferred alliteration: Build Back Better.

Some chose cheerfulness, such as FDR: Happy Days Are Here Again.

Some candidates put their name in the slogan to make it more memorable: “All the Way with LBJ” and “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too”.

Some clung to one solid campaign promise to remind you why you’re voting for them: “Read My Lips—No New Taxes”, or, more direct, and for the hungry, “A Chicken in Every Pot”.

Some went with humor: ABC-Anybody But Carter.

Starting with Reagan, we saw our candidates embrace grandiose optimism: It’s Morning Again in America. Change We Can Believe In. We Can Do It.

Then the puns: “Feel the Bern”, “America Needs a Good Cup of Joe”, and the famous, or infamous, “Make America Great Again”.

It’s enough to lead you to wonder—if Jesus wanted to captivate our attention with a short zippy line, what would he choose? Is it within the character and nature of Christ to pick one slogan?

Make Palestine Great Again!

Read My Lips—No New Ceasars!

Salvation We Can Believe In!

I’m disinclined to think Jesus would reduce his mission and ministry to a sound bite, and that leads us to this morning’s Gospel message. This morning while Jesus is minding his own business, the Pharisees get bored and bitter and decide to take out their frustrations on their favorite punching bag. Since that move is really played out by this point in the narrative, they decide to bring in a ringer: a lawyer. To be clear, a lawyer in this context isn’t someone who represents you in court, but rather an expert on the Law of Moses. So if you take a gander through Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy (the five books we Christians call the Pentateuch and our Jewish friends call the Torah), and you get through all the long words, all the begets, all the precise measurements of wood and fabric, and you’re still awake, congratulations, you have some solid determination. This guy who confronts Jesus this morning knows ALL of those rules, every single one. It’s by no means a small feat, so you really have to give credit where credit is due. The guy is smart. But is he wise? There’s a critical difference between the two.

The lawyer challenges Jesus with what he and the Pharisees hope will be an impossible question: which law is the greatest? He thinks he’s asking Jesus to pick which way he wants to die today. But once again, Jesus perceives the trap and outsmarts his opponent. Rather than picking one law out of many hundreds of them, he refers to a verse of the Hebrew Bible that reads like an expansion of the Golden Rule: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments. When I wrote that out on a piece of scratch paper this week it took up ¾ of a page. So this isn’t exactly something that would fit on a bumper sticker.

Indeed, Jesus wouldn’t fit in well with any political candidate we’ve ever had. Rather than focusing on quick quips and trending t-shirts, Jesus focuses on the content of a person’s character. Jesus teaches us about the type of leader we need to elect, and it has nothing to do with the party they are running with. How does that leader treat people? Are they compassionate? Wise? Merciful? Are they a gentle teacher? Are they selflessly pursuing a better future for us all?

That brings us to our Hebrew Bible message about one of the greatest leaders of our entire Judeo-Christian heritage: Moses, a man who would never have been elected for anything. A man who was born of an enslaved woman, and then raised in the palace, and didn’t know about his own origins until he was an adult. A man who lived on the lamb for years because he killed a guy. A man with a stuttering problem who needed his brother to deliver speeches for him. A man who struggled in patience and faith, who I imagine frequently considered ditching the Hebrews in the desert and starting over somewhere else. A man who must have struggled with directions since he spent 40 years wandering around the wilderness (he must have taken a wrong turn somewhere). A man who made one huge mistake, when he broke the tablets containing the 10 Commandments in anger after he saw his brother leading the Hebrews in idol worship. For this he got to the border of the Promised Land right before he died, but never set foot in it.

But then, just in the final moments of his life, rising up from the ashes we see Moses once again acting as the great leader God trusted him to be. He appoints a new great leader, Joshua, to succeed him. He dies with faith in God. And he ensures that his beloved people will live out their days in a glorious future that he himself would never benefit from. This is the kind of man God hand picked to lead YHWH’s beloved chosen. This is the type of person we need to look for in leading us.

In selecting the subtitle of this sermon I was inspired by the musical Hamilton. In a very moving scene George Washington gives words of advice to the young titular character, Alexander Hamilton. Washington tells Hamilton:

Let me tell you what I wish I'd known
When I was young and dreamed of glory
You have no control
Who lives, who dies, who tells your story
I know that we can win
I know that greatness lies in you
But remember from here on in
History has its eyes on you

200 years from now, when we’re all long dead and our great-great-great-great-grandchildren are reading about the election of 2020 in a history book, what will they read about us? We won’t have control of that narrative. If we vote selfishly, and elect a man who will cause harm to millions for the benefit of a few, we won’t get to spin that story into a nuanced account about the economy and states’ rights. History will not look kindly on us if we sell out our children’s futures for our own benefit, I can all but guarantee it.

Still, sometimes in our faith tradition we do have times where it’s appropriate to boil down our beliefs into a short, easily remembered statement.

To that end, there’s an old, famous story about the great Rabbi Hillel, who lived in the first Century CE. There was a Gentile man who was burning through the other rabbis in the neighborhood with his obnoxious questions about conversion. Finally this man came to Rabbi Hillel, and told him that if he could sum up the entire Torah in the time that the gentile could tolerate standing on one foot, he’d convert. Rabbi Hillel, in his brilliant glory, retorted: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah, the rest is just commentary.” No versions of this story tell us what happened to the Gentile man, but I think he converted.

What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. This ethos is what we need to search for in our leader. A person who believes this is who we need to support, and vote for. This type of person, regardless of their private religious practice, is the leader Jesus would have for us.

May it be so.

Amen.

I invite you to receive a benediction: Our God, our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, will guard our going out and our coming in, from this time on and forever more. And as all God’s people we say together: Amen.