[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]You\u2019ve often heard me say how our experience of Christianity, of the Church, is so very different from the Church of the past, from the Christianities of long ago.<\/p>\n
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Sometimes I am grateful for that difference; sometimes I\u2019m depressed by it, thinking about the beautiful wildness of the faith, what we\u2019ve lost, what we\u2019ve traded for the managed and bureaucratic thing we know today, the comfortable, bourgeois faith we can all easily control. It\u2019s hard to judge it the same thing at all\u2014what today passes for Christianity and what was Christianity then, in its earlier and more strange and more beautiful adolescence.<\/p>\n
And, of course, it simply is what it is. I don\u2019t recommend trying to recreate the past. Besides impossible, such attempts always end up something of a joke, sometimes even worse. It\u2019s a bad fantasy, bad theology too, to want to recreate what has been completely lost. This, I think, is true culturally, socially, and in the Church. There is no simple going back. There may, indeed, be the recovery of truth, the renewal of things, but that is a spiritual act, not a managed event. Again, it\u2019s about control: the reason so many supposed traditionalisms fail is because they are too managed, not wild enough.<\/p>\n
Now I\u2019m sorry for beating around the bush here, for I am obviously talking about the ways Christianity is experienced today in its many varieties, denominations, and inclinations both progressive and conservative, and everything else. Conditioned, all of us, no matter our politics, to treat Christianity as if it\u2019s some sort of supplier of private or cultural meaning, as if its main purpose is to make us better citizens or more respectable, we\u2019ve allowed, in more ways than you can count, Christianity to become something it isn\u2019t\u2014twisted to approve our prior identities, twisted to gain something else, power perhaps. This is what\u2019s wrong, I think, with what people are calling \u201cChristian nationalism.\u201d It\u2019s simply heresy; it\u2019s bad Christianity. But, of course, I consider most Western progressivisms heresy too, for these simply want a Christianity which approves whatever expressivist individuals approve, the herd of them. All of them I consider false Christianities\u2014saint-less, martyr-less.<\/p>\n
Again, I know I\u2019m beating around the bush; I\u2019m not naming names. I don\u2019t want to do that. I want to be respectful. I am thinking of that<\/em> person, but that other person too. But I\u2019m also thinking about myself when I suggest that our experience of Christianity is largely determined by the material conditions of our lives\u2014by things like politics, class, upbringing. And I\u2019m not really judging it at all; there is no getting away from our context, and God works through and within our context. God took flesh in context. Rather, what I\u2019m trying to say is that hidden within the noises of the world\u2014the noises of politics, social conflict, your family, the institutions of the Church\u2014within those noises, we must listen for the voice of the Good Shepherd, his beautiful voice. But that demands we be contemplatives, which is why I\u2019m always begging you to find a Bible and somewhere quiet to pray.<\/p>\n In a world of scribes and Pharisees, in a world of the false, false political leaders and false religious leaders\u2014”thieves,\u201d he called them, who only want to \u201csteal and slaughter and destroy\u201d\u2014in this world (very much like ours) Jesus called himself the \u201cgood shepherd.\u201d[1]<\/a> A political image, by calling himself a \u201cshepherd\u201d Jesus was challenging the real politics of the day; he was not offering some mere spiritual image, some nice thought to help you get through it all. Jesus was no Enlightenment liberal; for Jesus, religion was no mere private supplier of meaning. He was announcing a kingdom. But what does that mean? This is where we so often mess it up, trying to square the kingdom of the Good Shepherd with some politics or something else that doesn\u2019t work. But the fact is there is no straight line from the Bible to the politician you prefer. That\u2019s the difficulty: Jesus wasn\u2019t being only spiritual here; he was talking about something else. And I guess all I\u2019m saying is that it\u2019s better to sit with this difficulty rather than pretend we\u2019ve figured it out, thinking somehow God approves of our politics when he likely does nothing of the sort.<\/p>\n Friends, what I\u2019m saying is that in this election year, as the world gets louder\u2014and even if some of those loud people are Christians\u2014prepare yourself to be the sort of person who can listen for the true Shepherd\u2019s voice. I will not harass you about your politics; we can and should talk about it as friends, knowing our friendship is strong enough to handle it. And believe it or not, priests can preach on political matters. But I hope you never hear in this parish one of those foolish partisan homilies, the kind that pleases some too much while enraging others. I don\u2019t want to do that to you. Party politics is important; I don\u2019t want us to be a community that ignores real issues. It\u2019s just that to do that well, intelligently and charitably as Christian people, we must be people who hear the Shepherd\u2019s voice, who abide in him in Body and Blood and prayer. Which is what I consider my job this year: to make sure this place is a place where you can hear the real Shepherd\u2019s voice\u2014in this small sheepfold of parish in a world full of wolves. Amen<\/em>.<\/p>\n