Liberating Ourselves from the Curse of Left and Right, and Claiming our Core in Christ...

I

Refusing the Lie

I have written and spoken often in the past few years about the destructive impact of our incessant need to line up on one side or the other of an unending line of issues.    In our white hot culture wars these often get defined by right or left, liberal or conservative, or Democrat or Republican.    

My stance in all this continues to be that such divisions are false and designed to divide, not unite people.   There really is no such thing as a true conservative or a true liberal.   Neither we nor life are quite that simple.    Many of us, myself included, are enamored of our current President and many of the things he has tried to do.   Indeed, I find myself wishing for a third term possibility.   However, we cannot be blind to the fact that this President has deported a record number of undocumented people; young children, women, sending them back to poverty and violence.    This President has also led the way in a new kind of warfare using pilotless drones that kill indiscriminately.    Are these liberal or conservative actions?   Personally I don't care about the ideological label.  To me, those things are simply wrong.    It is wrong to send defenseless people into danger whether by deportation or by pilotless drones.   This is wrong from a moral, Christian perspective that defies ideological isolation.  

But this isn't only about political figures on the national stage.  It's also about us.

By way of confession, I will tell you that I live in a pretty conservative theological location while landing in what many would call a liberal social location.   So what does this make me?   Liberal?   Conservative?   Moreover, I hold some outrageously liberal political views, as well as some very conservative social positions.    And what's worse is that I am known to change my positions from time to time when new information renders that appropriate!

The labels we so quickly stick upon ourselves and others do not serve us, particularly if we are Christians.    At our United Methodist General Conference this past summer I actually heard a colleague who ought to know better say, "We can't work with (name deleted) because he's a conservative!"    Really?    I understood this to say that I cannot speak or listen to a person with whom I disagree.     This is not only tragic, it's sinful.     We follow a pathway that strives to remove the boundaries and the divisions that we so readily rise up between us.    While some of us deride a certain presidential candidate for wanting to build a wall along the Mexican / US border, we should be mindful of the walls that we erect in our communities and in our lives.    "In Christ there is no Greek or Jew.... (Galatians 3:28),"  and  Indeed, Christ is our peace, and in him "the dividing walls of hostility have come down (Ephesians 2:14).

What many of us do is to take our hardened ideological perspective and wrap it in the liturgical clothing of religion.    Right wing Christians?   Seriously?   Progressive Christians?   Are you kidding?    There is no left or right in Christian community, no male or female, gay or straight, no more social boundaries designed to alienate.    We are one in Christ, and the difficult struggle of sitting down together to open the Word and to pray through our differences is our clear and sacred call.    One has to ask who it is that benefits while we battle across our ideological lines?    Certainly it is not the people who get wounded and killed in these struggles.

This binary social construct  that has held us captive for so long is designed to separate and disempower us.       Our work is to break this down and engage one another authenticall in faith.  Our call is to be in relationship those with whom we disagree, rather than isolate them and refuse to communicate.  Engagement and open connection with those who differ with us not only a good idea, it is one way that we can grow, expand and change.   It's possible, even probably that when we sit down in authentic community with those who don't see the world as we do that our perspectives and our understandings might change.  

So it is that it's long past time to refuse the lie of ideological rigidity and strive for the building of new communities of hope, power, and diversity.

II

Refusing the Lie Does Not Relieve Us of the Responsibility to Tell the Truth

As we extricate ourselves from the divisionistic ways of our secular culture we have to remember another call that comes to us in Christian community.    And that is the call to not remain silent in the face of evil.  While we work together to expand the table of community and to engage those of different perspectives, we are still recipients of the call to struggle for justice and to stand for what is good and true.    

As I mentioned above, my overall good opinion of President Obama does not relieve me of the responsibility for naming the dramatic rise in deportations and the continuance of what seems to be a permanent state of warfare in our nation.    Presidential candidates who brag about their participation in sexual violence cannot be greeted with our silence or inaction.  The fact that young African American men are being shot down in our streets cannot be ignored.    The reality that more than 15% of the children in our nation are hungry is not something we can simply not acknowledge.   

No.  It needs to be abundantly clear that the willingness to engage across the artificial boundaries erected by our culture is not to be confused with our responsibility to name evil and to stand against it while also naming the good and standing for that.

Is this difficult?   Yes.   Is it following the way of Jesus?   I believe it is.    

My hope is that we will live into a kind of grace that allows us to be willing to engage difference while also being clear about justice.    My prayer is that we will always keep Christ at the center, and not the shallow ideologies that our culture seeks to sell us.  My commitment is to continue to engage in the joyful struggle to build communities of faith live out the Way of Jesus.   

What we seek is what Dietrich Bohnhoeffer reffered to as "Costly Grace."

"Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble; it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: "ye were bought at a price," and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.”