I think that most people would agree that they don’t like politics. And what I mean by politics are not the basic pieces required to govern a society, but rather what I am talking about is the seediness of the whole process - the tearing down and destroying of those with which we disagree. When we think political and what we don’t like about it we often think of the scheming people whose sole job it is to see that their person wins and that the other person loses. Of course, if it’s our guy who is being built up we may have warmer feelings for the process, but let’s leave hypocrisy out of this discussion. Politics can often be summed up by reworking one of Jesus’ statement – it is pointing out the speck in your neighbors eye while saying the log in your own eye either does not exist or is someone else’s fault. The politics that people do not like is really self-centeredness dressed up to appear respectable.
And that brings us naturally to today’s Gospel lesson, which among other things reminds us that Solomon was right when he told us that there is nothing new under the sun. The basics are this: The Chief Priests and Elders come to Jesus and ask him by what authority he is doing these miracles. Most likely they were not genuinely curious, but were trying to trip Jesus up so they could let everyone know what a bad guy he was. Jesus does not answer but instead asks them a question about the baptisms that John the Baptist performed and whether those were heaven sanctioned or just something that man did. Then the text records, “And they argued with one another, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say to us, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ we are afraid of the crowd; for all regard John as a prophet.” So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And he said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.” And so I guess you could say it ended in a political stalemate with the Chief Priests and Elders not willing to have their reputations tarnished in an attempt to tarnish Jesus’ reputation.
But let’s make this a little more about us. As best I know none of us are High Priests or for that matter political strategists who appear regularly on television, but rather we live more sedate, quiet lives. And so it is not an unreasonable question to ask what all of this has to do with us. We are not seeking to destroy an opposition candidate or Jesus as the High Priests want to do today, rather we just live in the day in and day out. But here is the thing, we do not need to live high profile lives to engage in political behavior. Anytime we seek to make ourselves look better or someone else look worse we are engaging in political behavior.
Something that has been getting a bit of press lately in terms of political alignments and general discord in this nation and the world has to do with the internet. The theory is that the internet in bringing people together has actually pushed them further apart. What they mean by this is that it is fairly easy in the world of the internet to only go places that reinforce our belief system and avoid those which do not. So, for example, if I am a Republican or Democrat I can get my news only from sources that share my political views and read opinion pieces only from those who share my outlook on life. The theory is that as people are more easily able to interact exclusively with their own kind they eventually lose any frame of reference when dealing with people who do not agree with them, because they really only know other points of views filtered through their own points of view. As a result there is more distrust between groups and not much conversation. The “other side” is viewed as more caricature than actual person. And so the interactions that do happen are more often of the artillery shell variety. That is we lob something into their camp and they lob something back. And in such an environment the temptation to be political in the same way we see the High Priests and Elders becomes much stronger because we don’t really have to interact with those we oppose. And since we do not know the other person, we can seek to destroy them without feeling bad or even having to acknowledge their humanity.
I have this rather bizarre history and it has to do with three friends of mine. It probably says something terrible about me, but the thing is there are three people in my life whom upon first meeting I could not stand – and really the feeling was mutual. But later these three people ended up being three of my closest friends. And in all three cases the way we ended up becoming good friends was because we had, through various circumstances, to spend a lot of time with each other – one was a roommate, one was in my fraternity pledge class and one I ended up on a long trip with. It was in the time spent together that we realized that our impressions of each other were not correct and that we rather enjoyed each other. But for this to happen we had to actually be together.
The interaction we have today in scripture was not an interaction based on each other’s common humanity but was rather an exercise in point scoring. The High Priests wanted to trap Jesus because they had decided that they did not like him. So they decided not to get to know him but rather to use words to further their agenda. And that is the thing in getting to know someone, in becoming friends with someone, we cannot force it. It cannot just be our idea but involves both people. Friendship involves us being vulnerable and trusting the other person to not exploit our weaknesses. Political interactions on the other hand seek to exploit weakness for our own gain rather than share in them and grow closer to the person through that. But it is really no way to live. Political life is a life lived between fear and vindictiveness. It is a life that seeks to push away and destroy others.
Fortunately for most people in the Episcopal Church they do not have to deal with the brokenness that has happened within Anglicanism in the past ten or fifteen years in this country, but I am not so fortunate because I work at Nashotah House. We serve both students from The Episcopal Church and those from various jurisdictions that are deliberately not in the Episcopal Church. As a result we fairly regularly get accused, by those on the outside, of being both too Episcopal and too not Episcopal. For example this past week we had the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church come for a visit – which all sounds rather painless. An Episcopal Bishop comes to an Episcopal seminary, but because of the tribalism rampant in North American Anglicanism it was not. We were accused of abandoning the faith by some, accused of heresy by others and if the internet is to be believed many were openly hoping that we would shut down. This is how we enter into discussion nowadays. We find something with which we do not agree and hope that we can make it potent enough to kill the other person or, in this case, institution. The demand for blood sacrifices has never gone away. And since this instinct has been around for so long I am not sure that it will ever go away, but that does not mean that we have to participate in it. And so the next time we are mad at someone we don’t know it might behoove us to take a step back. To not make it personal and maybe do something crazy like follow one of Jesus instructions which is to “love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.” It may make us draw closer to God so that we may be his both now and forevermore.