Dear Faith Family,
What could a good and governed life with others look like?
This is the question we encouraged one another to ask towards the conclusion of our "talking politics" conversation on Sunday. It's a natural question considering that politics literally is the activities associated with the governance of people sharing life with other people. Indeed it's the question to which each party and pundit is offering a flavored answer. No one (or at least very few) are satisfied with things the way they are. Everyone is offering a vision of a new future, which is why many of us feel confused and overwhelmed.
Whatever varied version we end up persuaded or convicted to affirm (in part or whole) feels a bit shallow. Some are too idealistic; others not broad enough to address the issues at hand. In the soil of our current environment, even the noblest conceptualizations seem to lack the depth and fertility to bring about something truly different, actually new.
So where are we to go? Where do we go with our noble dreams of belonging and living together? The answer, contends Willie James Jennings, is to "seek a deeper soil." In the following quote, Jennings offers a "noble dream," for good and governed life, a dream you may or may not share. Regardless, take note of where his dream takes roots, and what is then produced.
Commenting on his book, The Christian Imagination: theology and the origins of race, Jennings says,
This work...joins the growing conversation regarding the possibilities of a truly cosmopolitan citizenship. Such a world citizenship imagines cultural transactions that signal the emergence of people whose sense of agency and belonging breaks open not only geographical and nationalist confines but also the strictures of ethnic and racial identities. This is indeed a noble dream even if it is a moving target given the conceptual confusions and political struggles around multicultural discourse. Yet I hope to intervene helpfully in this conversation by returning precisely to the question of the constitution of such a people and such a citizenship.
However, rather than building the hope of a cosmopolitanism from the soil of an imagined democratic spirit, I seek a deeper soil. That deeper rich soil is not easily unearthed. It is surely not resident at the surface levels of Christianity and ecclesial existence today. Yet Christianity marks the sport where, if noble dream joins hand with God-inspired hope and presses with great impatience against the insularities of life, for example, national, cultural, ethnic, economic, sexual, and racial, seeking the deeper ground upon which to seed a new way of belonging and living together, then we will find together not simply new ground, not simply new seed, but a life already prepared and offered to us.
It seems to me that the "already prepared and offered" life which Jennings says we'll find when our visions are planted in deeper soil is the "Blessed" picture Jesus paints in his Sermon on the Mount.
While we are quick to separate state and scripture, and prone to dismiss Jesus as an ideal, we must remember, Jesus' portrait of a good and governed life is not an alien utopia, but very much grounded in the reality of daily experiences. Kingdom citizenry does not remove us from our American constituency but rather, sprouts up within it from deeper and more fertile soil. This earthiness cultivated in life with the "otherworldly" depicted in Jesus' preached vision of life together is what allows us to pray to our heavenly Father with faith-filled, 'God-inspired' hope, "Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven."
So, no matter how you answer the question in God-honoring faith*, in this moment or in the future, remember that your conviction must join hands with God-inspired hope and a "seek first his kingdom and his righteousness" perseverance. Only then will our lived response have the flavor and clarity of a new way already prepared and offered.
Love you faith family. God bless.
*See Romans 14, especially Paul's exhortation that "Each should be fully convinced in his own mind," with the motivational driver of honoring God (vv. 5-8), and the necessity to act with conviction of faith (vv. 22-23).