JESUS FOR PRESIDENT
A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

June 8, 2008

I have spent the larger part of my life focused on the spiritual discipline of seeking the movement of God through this book, the collection of holy writings, that we call the Bible.  The word bible translated back into its Latin root, literally means library.  The Bible is a collection of works that have traditionally been known in Christian and Hebrew circles as the main library of our faith traditions.

I choose the plural form, traditions, on purpose.  Christianity has hundreds of current traditions in active play around the world.  A colleague did a count here in Monroe County and found over 100 churches and few serious overlapping traditions.  The United Methodists have more churches in Monroe County than anyone else and they would count as having, obviously, a shared tradition.  I don't know how many Baptist Churches there are in this county, but because we Baptists believe in soul autonomy and congregational independence—each Baptist group is highly individualized.  We Baptists have a tendency to ponder this as a good thing, something that is essential to our belief that each person comes before God, just as we are, without one plea and that we cannot depend on organizational belief structures to supersede that which we are responsible for.  The UCC is very similar, though has some group vitality and structure that Baptists struggle to have.  It makes for a very good blend here at First United.

I start with my Bible and every Monday I am somewhat slavishly devoted to reading the next Sunday's readings.  I read them on Monday and live with them through the week.  I don't do this in a vacuum, however.  I also have my homepage devoted to MSNBC news coverage that is updated more often than I care to know.  Of course, I have the daily paper to read and WFIU to listen to, CNN to watch and real life to live.  The obvious problem happens when all that reading, listening and watching becomes life, rather than meeting people and all the rest of God's creatures in a meaning-filled existence.  On my best weeks, all of this comes together for me, as a spiritual discipline, a seeking to understand more fully what it is that God is seeking to make known to me.

If you are a participant in politics you know that the '08 Presidential election candidates were determined this week, along with a white preacher/priest in greater Chicagoland getting an unplanned two-week vacation for making some very crude racially-tinged remarks about candidate Hillary Clinton while showing great favoritism toward Barack Obama.  Father Pfleger has devoted his life to being a presence of Jesus in many inner-city places in and around Chicago .  I have met and known him for nearly twenty years and he is a phenomenal preacher, a gifted priest in the Roman tradition who has done a world of good for the economically and racially segregated areas of the tri-state area he has served.  But he let his anger, his reputation, his mouth get way ahead of his normally very schooled self and showed from the Trinity UCC pulpit an extremely biased preference for one candidate over another.

If you don't know, that is the one thing that churches who have tax-exempt status do at risk of losing tax-exempt status.  We can take stands on issues till the proverbial cows come home.  Not only I, but you, on church property, in the name of First United, cannot seek to influence voters for one candidate over another.  We cannot sponsor candidate electioneering that shows preference for one candidate over another.  By law, the country expects us, as the church, as a corporate body, to be fair. 

We can give up the privilege of having tax-exempt status.  Many churches and faith groups have.  They now pay property tax, local, state and national income tax and the money that folks put into the offering plates are no longer tax-deductable gifts.  This enables them to do electioneering, to be openly biased toward one candidate over another.  I personally struggle to see how having one more property with an election campaign sign up in the yard will benefit our world.  Electioneering does not seem to need one more building to meet in and I hesitate to suggest that, to the degree that we are God's representative, we have any words or hints from Jesus suggesting one candidate over another as an appropriate concern for the church body.

I was approached this week to see if I, as a minister of First United, would be a candidate for or would support a Christian candidate for the Monroe County School Board who would bring God back into our schools, along with a Bible-based curriculum and required daily prayer.  The gentleman who came to my office was very polite and stirred to some degree of militancy with his belief that although he claimed 84% of Americans are Christian, we are allowing the ACLU to run amuck and thwart the will of the majority of United States citizens.   He is convinced that majority rule is the law of our land.  He did not have much appreciation for the Bill of Rights section of the United States Constitution or the fact that it was even an essential part of the constitution, guaranteeing minority rights so that the majority cannot produce their own tyranny against those who disagree with the majority.

It was difficult for him to be in dialogue with someone who is both Christian and a card carrying member and supporter of the ACLU.  I don't see a problem there, but I was fairly quickly rejected as a probable candidate to be considered to run for school board.  But, I argued, aren't I a Christian?  I have been baptized, I have heard a call from God, and I seek with diligence to be a servant to the ways of Jesus.  Aren't I a Christian?

This visitor to my office was most polite.  I hope I was as well.  I found myself wanting to teach, to help expand his awareness of the plethora of faith experiences that are Christian.  He assumed an orthodoxy, a center point within Christianity, that I do not honestly think exists; at least I would name the center point as different than he would, and aren't I a Christian?

“Wouldn't I like to see God back in Monroe County Schools?” he asked.  Isn't it interesting how we all view the same scenario so differently and yet the same?  Each of us here this morning will leave with as many different takes on this message, our time spent together, as we are distinct individuals who have come to church this morning filled with wants, needs, disappointments and hopes.

God is fully, I sought to explain, fully present in each and every Monroe County School and in every public and private school in the world.  God is fully present down the street at the Office Lounge and in every room at the Travel Lodge motel next to the Red Lobster and God is fully present in every bedroom and kitchen in our homes and God is fully present in every dump filled with toxic waste and in every Islamic Mosque and Jewish Synagogue.

As a religious leader, I am fervently in favor of God's active presence in every aspect of my and your living.  I believe that God has a dream, a purpose, an aim and ideal in a package waiting to be unwrapped in every moment of our lives, in every particular place and happening in all of creation.  There is not a time that God is not achingly, persuadingly present—hoping for us when we are depressed, providing purpose for us when we are rudderless and not knowing which way to turn next. 

It is in the nature of God, of this I am so very sure, it is in the nature of God to experience everything that happens in creation.   I have been on this altar with couples of every sexual identity and joined with them as they have sought in the presence of God and family to dedicate themselves to love, honor and cherish till death do them part or for all the days of their lives together.  I have been brought to crying like a baby while here on this altar tears of utter joy have been shed as people pledge their undying love to each other and rejoice in being able to do so.   And, I believe that God is crying too.  I believe that God joins us in these exquisite moments of dedication and commitment and God rejoices and cries and dances with the angels.

God is present in the privacy of our homes, behind the closed doors of our living and hating and envying and boasting and you add the terms.  I know the depth of my sinning, my less than perfectness and I trust that each of us is similarly self aware.  God is present for every injury to body and soul and spirit.  God is present as the earth turns barren and all the creatures must either relocate or die.  God is not just out there in the immense eternity of time and space, but God is fully present in every moment of our world of lives.

Can you imagine—I can't—that the fullness of all the sin, the hurt, the pain, the waste, the intentional and unintentional acts of violence that occurs each moment of time that has occurred since forever, is all in the essence and memory of God?  My belief is that God takes it all in and not only cries and hurts and grieves, but God then sends it back out with hope for what yet can be if only we who can choose will follow God's lure, God's hope into the next moment's future possibilities.

There is not a place, a time, an event that God is not seeking to fully redeem and make whole.  It is not just happening in the name of Jesus.  God is seeking to redeem the world, to make it whole through every religious impulse.  God is not as choosy who God works through as we are.  In fact, God is moving through every aspect of creation seeking to bring redemption and wholeness. 

In my life, more often than I care to admit, when I see no hope, when I see nothing good yet to possibly occur, my faith is that God is bigger than I am and that God cannot change what I have done, but God can dream of what can yet happen if I and others will yet give ourselves over to the spirit of God that is fully believing in us.

God does not do and cannot do magic.  God loves miracles.  And miracles are when people stand back up and with God's vision, with God's energy, with faith that God is alive and well and believing in us—despite the walls of slavery and bigotry and homophobia and any number of isms that keep people down due to prejudice and  sin—those people stand again and with the aid of spirit-filled allies walk out of the danger and the dungeons and the defeat that have too long held some of God's most precious creatures from enjoying the fullness of God ordained human liberty.

Glory be to God and millions of darker skinned Americans who died never believing that this country could ever rise from the slave pits and leg irons to have a candidate for the US Presidency be a person of dark skin in the midst of a country that has known racial prejudice at the deepest and ugliest of levels.  Dr King's dream for these United States was not his, but God's and it is now more than one step closer to becoming reality.  The sacred conversations on race that Micaela preached about so well a couple weeks back have only begun with renewed interest.  God is pulling us to go where God has been dreaming of us to travel and bring redemption to ourselves and to our world family by embracing the depth of our cultural sins and praying to bringing redemption as we faithfully live lives that acknowledge openly the sins of our past and walk bravely toward a future whose outline has been traced by divine fingers.  Divine dreams do not operate out of fear, retaliation or revenge.   Nor are they ever defined by greed or violence or national power ambitions.

Isn't it worth noting that it is just okay, appropriate even, to stand in opposition to some of our Biblical material?  When I suggest in many conversations that the God of Jesus Christ is not a God of violence…, you can see it people's eyes.  They are sure that I have not bothered to read the First Testament stories where God ordained the slaughter of tens of thousands per paragraph.  Or, I will be reminded by many that God sent Jesus to die by execution so that God's wrath against humanity might be soothed by the blood of the sacrifice.  That is bloody good theology.

Sadly, what has often happened in our family and national storytelling is the same rule of thumb used in biblical interpretation and faith development.  Just because a story is told over and over again in the same fashion, does not make it true, just oft-times repeated.  We must demand of our faith and our lives a more in-depth critical analysis that will ultimately risk bringing faith in God beyond simplistic moralisms, literalistic reading of Scripture and continued perpetuation of the belief that there can be redemption through violence either for individuals or countries.

There are many biblical stories that best teach God's people how not to be ever again, but they often are lifted up in ignorance as examples of what God's people must do to defend God and God's ways.  I love God too well to stand before you and ever suggest that God desires violence, ever.  Men and women resort to violence and claim God's support rather than do the very hard work of peace and justice and compassion and offering mercy. 

What does God require from the Hebrew Testament?  Do you remember from a couple weeks ago?  If you read the best of the best and listen to the preachers who have struggled with the best and the worst you will read and hear the first two-thirds of the Holy Writ in Hosea as the prophet says, AND WHAT DOES GOD REQUIRE?  BUT TO DO JUSTICE, LOVE MERCY, TO WALK HUMBLY.  It goes on to say, to walk humbly with God.  Since God is everywhere, that means walking humbly all the time.  Period. No add-ons.

And in the Second Testament, the Christian Scriptures, what is it all about? 

The ages have filled our awareness with doctrines and creeds and all sorts of minutiae.  But, what did Jesus say was most important to gain eternal life?  He was asked.  He gave in about two sentences enough material to keep us busy for several lifetimes.   What Jesus said did not make it into any of the creeds.   It has always amazed me that a church that claims to believe in the ways of Jesus, who spoke so simply, has fought and killed and maimed and suppressed for centuries over belief statements, doctrines and confessions that are just made up. Jesus said it very plainly in Mark's Gospel.  You know in your heart already:  And one of the scribes came and heard them arguing, and recognizing that He had answered them well, asked Him, "What commandment is the foremost of all?" Jesus answered, "The foremost is, 'Hear, O Israel ! The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.' "The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these." (NAS, Mark 12:28-31)

These two verses—one from the Hebrew Scriptures and this last one from the mouth of Jesus—sum up the totality of what it means for me to be a person of faith.  And, am I not a Christian? 

Jesus does not want to be President.  There is quite a movement in place for people to write in Jesus on the ballot this November.  I don't think God cares who runs for President.  God cares about how we respect and love all the little children of our world…, the two-footed, four-footed, finned and multi-legged, and even no-legged ones.  With the greatest of sincere belief in the presence of God in the world, let us leave this place and move it one and fifty times closer toward what God wants it to be as a result of each of our lives in it.  God has to depend on you and me.  You know what God requires!?