By The Rev. Susan Balfour
Greetings, Beloved!
I give thanks for you every day as I hold you in my prayers! Your warmth and faith are testament to the Christlike faith community you have built here in Fountain City.
In sensitive, polarizing times, it can be difficult to meet and dialog with others with respect, especially when secular rhetoric speaks of “the other” in dehumanizing terms. And I have heard that our church family has experienced painful rifts because of it. From my experience, however, when partisan political rhetoric rises to the emotional level we see every day, it’s difficult to keep strictly mum inside the church on topics of broad import. At some point, someone will say something that may be taken to be partisan, even if that is not the intent; surely we’re all aware of “buzz words” that can have multiple connotations but have also been appropriated or coopted into partisan speech.
Some of you may have seen my Facebook post about the difference between partisanship and politics. Politics—from the Greek word polis, meaning “society”—is how we come together to build society in healthy, dynamic ways; partisanship is how we pull away from one another to build society in static and often spiteful ways. Allow me to stress that no one party is doing politics in our current climate—it’s almost entirely partisanship on all fronts and has been for at least my entire voting career.
How does any of this apply to the church? We can and should indeed “leave our bumper stickers in the parking lot” as the PNC phrased it. After all, bumper stickers are meant to be declarative and often confrontational, and most of us do park in the same parking lot! However, Jesus speaks often about how to build society together, as does most of the Hebrew Testament; in other words, Scripture is political without being partisan. Holding this difference in tension, we can more freely explore what Scripture has to say about the world around us, outside the church walls, letting God speak to our polis without jumping to partisan assumptions. With this in mind, I hope we can find our way past polarizing language in a manner that allows us to dream together how our faith can witness to what our politics can look like and achieve, regardless of party affiliation. We can teach our government leaders quite a bit about how to sit in a room together and engage in fellowship, comraderie, and dialog!
In all things, we turn to Christ’s teachings, seeking wisdom in the Scriptures that can and do apply not only to our personal and family lives, but to our life out in the world, too.
I bid you find your blessing in being a blessing.