I’m not just tired of political ads, I’m tired and angry. And I also feel that about you political prognosticators who fill TV and social media screens with your “wisdom.” So many of you are obsessed about political power, and the businessmen who own your media outlets are ultimately about money. There, I got it off my chest, but I suspect I’m not alone.
If you would kindly stay with me. Illustrations are important in sermons. Any preacher who looks at people as he preaches, someone who doesn’t have his head buried in a manuscript to read, knows from eyeballing people that they perk up when you give a real-life illustration, something that helps them understand how faith applies to life as we’re really experiencing it. What illustration might help us understand the political anger of so many Americans today?
Aren’t many political ads and in-the-tank prognosticators a perfect illustration of self-righteousness? Politics is supposed to be a way of working out our differences, not feeding off of and fueling self-righteousness, “I’m right and you’re wrong.” “Americans don’t want to share a living room with one another. We prefer to live and be entertained in ideological encampments” (Tressie McMillan Cottom, NY Times, Nov. 3; A23). “The righteousness of the righteous ones is hard and self-assured. They, too, want forgiveness, but they believe that they do not need much of it. And so their righteous actions are warmed by very little love” (Paul Tillich, “The New Being,” in “For All the Saints,” IV, 1031).
“Having spent time around ‘sinners’ and also around purported saints, I have a hunch why Jesus spent so much time with the former group: I think he preferred their company. Because the sinners were honest about themselves and had no pretense, Jesus could deal with them. In contrast, the saints put on airs, judged him, and sought to catch him in a moral trap. In the end it was the saints, not the sinners, who arrested Jesus” (Philip Yancey, “What’s So Amazing about Grace?” In “unChristian,” David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, 60).
Oh my, what a rich time for preachers to lift listeners to the love of Jesus! Use real life to illustrate what is, or should be, so fundamentally different about our gathering together around Him who alone is our righteousness. Amen?
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