Rev. Peter Plagge
Memorial Day Sunday, 2022
Readings
Gospel of the Nazarenes, Variant to Mt. 19:14-24
The other of the rich men said to him “Master, what good thing shall I do and live?” He said to him “Man, perform the law and the prophets.” He answered him “I have performed them.” He said to him “Go, sell all that thou hast and divide it to the poor, and come, follow me.” But the rich man began to scratch his head, and it pleased him not. And the Lord said to him “How can you say ‘I have performed the law and the prophets’? seeing that it is written in the law ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,’ and look, many of your brothers, sons of Abraham, are clad with dung, dying for hunger, and your house is full of much goods, and there goes out therefrom nought at all unto them.” And he turned and said to Simon his disciple, sitting by him, “Simon, son of John, it is easier for a camel to enter through the eye of a needle than a rich man into the kingdom of the heavens”.
Federal Election Commission v. Ted Cruz for Senate Supreme Court Ruling, Kagan, J., dissenting
Political contributions that will line a candidate’s own pockets, given after his election to office, pose a special danger of corruption. The candidate has a more-than-usual interest in obtaining the money (to replenish his personal finances), and is now in a position to give something in return. The donors well understand his situation and are eager to take advantage of it. In short, everyone’s incentives are stacked to enhance the risk of dirty dealing. At the very least—even if an illicit exchange does not occur—the public will predictably perceive corruption in post-election payments directly enriching an officeholder. Congress enacted Section 304 to protect against those harms. In striking down the law today, the Court greenlights all the sordid bargains Congress thought right to stop.
[…] Section 304 has guarded against that threat for two decades, but no longer. In discarding the statute, the Court fuels non-public-serving, self-interested governance. It injures the integrity, both actual and apparent, of the political process. I respectfully dissent.
Sermon
Perhaps at times like this, when the world, reeling from an unprovoked invasion by Russia into a peaceful, neighboring Democracy, and from a mass shooting in New York driven by white supremacist rage, and another mass shooting last week driven by who-knows what kind of rage, and our politics increasingly driven by partisan rage, we would do well to remind ourselves of the conclusions from Stephen Pinker’s extraordinary research published in a massive book a decade ago called the Better Angels of our Nature: human violence is on a downward trend. The better angels of our nature are winning out.
That is cold comfort, of course, for the 19 families in Texas who now have a child-shaped hole in their lives. And it is cold comfort to thousands of black men, women, and children targeted, not just by gun violence, but by racial violence of all kinds.
But at least it might allow us right now, today, the freedom to think about a solution that is not directly related to gun policy but to question of enlarging the circle of angels looking after us. In fact, I think Nicholas Kristoff is correct, in his recent op-ed after Uvalde, that “The liberal approach [to curbing gun violence] is ineffective.” The time is now, he suggests, for new, community-based, public health approaches.
I don’t want to talk about policy – I am not qualified, and this is not really our job here. But I also don’t think our job is to merely offer our “thoughts and prayers.” Our job is to broaden and deepen the notion of community as the beloved community, or as I want to call it today, community-as-justice.
I also realize that it seems a bit pollyannish to suggest that a Christian approach to these problems holds a key. . . Especially since we are a “Christian nation.” However, it seems to me that at least one Christian approach might offer some way forward that is neither liberal in the way Nicholas Kristoff rightly wants to leave behind, nor conservative in the way that most modern, free-market of goods and ideas approach takes.
The Christian perspective I want to talk about has its roots in the deepest soil of humanistic philosophy, the notion as Thomas Jefferson put it in his statute on Religious Freedom in Virginia’s constitution – “Truth is great, and has nothing to fear from conflict unless [she is] disarmed of her natural weapon, free argument and debate.”
The issue, when we talk about a new community-based approach, is not truth, as much as it is about the place where truth can be debated and the kinds of behaviors we ought to adopt if indeed this debate is to freely occur.
I would suggest to you, on this Memorial Day Sunday, that this becomes quite obvious when we consider that the men and women we honor today served and died for this country because they thought democracy was worth defending. They did not die for the right of a market to provide for our bad habits, and they certainly did not die for the idea that the one with the most money determines what is good and true for a democracy. They served and died for a higher ideal – quite simply the ideal of freedom, especially as it is enshrined in the first amendment and made explicit in Thomas Jefferson’s statute.
It is my conviction, and the whole point of speaking on Memorial Day weekend, that the first amendment expresses everything that is profound about our democracy and that it was designed to ensure its democracy’s viability. Furthermore, that this expression, “that truth will out not shorn of her natural weapons, free argument and debate,” is not at odds with our faith, but is bolstered by it.
oo00oo
Over the last dozen years or so, the first amendment has come under attack by those who believe that freedom of speech is not a matter of religious, our humanistic philosophy, but a matter of the free market driven by consumer ideals.
Several recent Supreme Court decisions, the most recent from which we just read, support this claim. The attack on free speech, at least as Jefferson described it, seems to have begun in earnest in 2010
when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United vs. the Federal Elections Committee. That ruling, in terms of the first amendment, basically said that money = speech and that it is, therefore, unconstitutional to limit the campaign contributions a corporation, like say, the NRA can make to a political campaign. Gloves off.
Another nail was put into the coffin of the First Amendment almost two weeks ago in the Cruz vs. Federal Elections Commission decision.
The dissent from which I just read is Justice Kagan’s horrified response to this ruling which, in a nutshell, she says enshrines bribery. There is a difference she notes to money paid to a candidate before the election when the donor can only hope that his or her money will see fruits, and donations made after office has been attained when the donor expects fruits. Justice Kagan writes: “preventing quid pro quo corruption, or its appearance, is a compelling interest by any measure” and that striking down these guardrails drives a stake into democracy’s heart; meaning, I take it, a stake into the individual right, no matter one’s person, position or wealth, to be a part of the conversation.
oo00oo
At its heart, Christian faith is neither liberal nor conservative, it’s communitarian – it invites this mutual concern. Indeed the first word for Church in the book of Acts is ekklesia – meaning literally called out. The word implies, in it’s context of the newly forming Christian community, serving not only themselves in love, but those in their wider community, something we might call community-as-justice.
I choose to read the variation of Matthew 19 this morning, despite its similarities to the version you have in your pew bibles, because its focus is not on another world, not on eternal life, but on life in this world, life as community-as-justice
The variation makes clear what the original doesn’t: we are called to love God with all our heart and mind and strength, and, therefore also to love one another, our neighbor, no matter who that one may be, as ourselves. The second calling flows from the first. The God we are called to serve without reservation loves all creatures without reservation, so that loyalty to God is loyalty to those whom God loves.
Since this world belongs to God, we belong to each other, and justice requires a social order designed to maximize the contribution that each of us can make to it. Our life together is communal. That is what ekklesia meant then, and is today, what Christians mean when we talk about community.
Since, according to the Christian notion of community, we belong to each other, because everything in the world belongs to the love of God, the new community into which we are called, is not a community of libertarian ideals, where whatever the market will bear, whatever we can afford, is thereby good.
What matters is what we make of our lives together . . .whether we live in a way that makes each person a beneficiary and a potential benefactor of our communities. What really counts is not things that satisfy our wants but our relationships with people, relationships in which each is the greater because she or he both gives to and receives from the creative energy of others.
You can see now, why so many find the Cruz decision so appalling. The issue at stake is your right to be involved in the conversation about what a just social order looks like, your right, and your call to be a benefactor and a beneficiary of our life together. That right is heavily tarnished when free speech becomes equated with the power of the market.
oo00oo
Campaign finance rules like the 2002 Act will not guarantee the political process as a full and free discussion. But the promise of democracy, for which people have given their lives, will not be renewed, will not find new life and vigor, its sons and daughters will not preach the common good, its old men will not dream dreams and its young men see visions, without it.
For those of us for whom God seems to ordain ekklesia, or community as justice, the call is clear: we are to join in the search for appropriate ways to give voice to the voiceless, to re-instill dreams to the dreamless and put the voice of prophecy back in everyone’s mouth so that each can be benefactor to each and benefit one from the other. Amen.
