Guest column by Rev. Jim CastroLang
In the late spring, I was fighting bronchitis but I didn’t know it yet. I saw a physician’s assistant in my clinic and had a bad experience. Here’s how it went! Question to me: “What do you do for a living?” Answer: “I work in politics and I am a pastor.” Response from him: “Well that is a clear contradiction.” My reply: “I don’t think so!” – which was much nicer than what I was thinking. I won’t say more about this unprofessional medical experience but now you do need to know more about me.
I am the chair of the Spokane County Democrats and I am a pastor in the progressive United Church of Christ (UCC). Following this bad office visit, I was elected as a Bernie Sanders delegate to the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Philadelphia. I have just returned from this amazing Convention experience.
Let me offer three areas of reflection on being a person of faith at this Convention:
Benedictions: Each of the four days of the Convention ended with a Benediction. Day One: Rabbi Schonfeld, Day Two: Rev. Tony Campolo, Day Three: Rev. Gabriel Salguero and, Day Four: Rev. William Shillady. What a difficult task as these prayers came after the big speech of the night and after 11 PM. I noticed how many people didn’t pay attention to these prayers as they streamed out of the arena and picked up their conversation. As a pastor, I felt bad for these religious leaders. I also wondered about a few other things, like why we have these prayers at all. We know from all the surveys that this hall was filled with lots of atheists, agnostics and nominal believers. So why at this secular event are there prayers at all? I wanted to take a quiet moment to pray but the hall was a-buzz with energy and noise. There was little sense of quieting or centering ourselves in the presence of God.
I wondered, with all these convention speeches, what is the difference between a prayer and a speech? Well, the prayers addressed God but other than that they were laden with phrases and images that I heard in some many speeches throughout the Convention. There were words about welcoming the stranger and the refugee – about inclusivity of all regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity. These prayers reminded us of God’s call for us to come together in community and together transform the world for good. It felt like Hillary speech writers worked up some language and then the religious leader came in and oriented the words as a prayer toward God. I suppose all of us pray out of the cultural language and understandings of our situation but maybe sometimes God speaks and breaks through all of these tunnel vision filters of our world – the voice of the prophets maybe? I know that when I am in prayer at our local Ministerial Association in Colville, the prayers from the conservative church ministers are often filled with language foreign to me, requests of God I don’t agree with, and putting words in “God’s mouth” that my God would never say. I think I need to go back and look at the prayers from the Republican National Convention and see if they are prayers to a different God.
Political & Religious Shared Values: I was interviewed on the floor of the convention by a reporter from a Pullman newspaper. As he pursued a lengthy conversation with me, I found myself saying, “I find that the values from my faith and the United Church of Christ (UCC) and those of the Democratic Party are in close alignment.” These are progressive values that find us always reaching out beyond our privilege to include those who have been beaten down by prejudice and lack of opportunity. Both my faith and my politics require me to demand and work for justice for every person. This includes adequate shelter, basic health care, sufficient food each day, and a livable wage. These do not need to be earned. They come with our humanity to be treated with dignity and respect. My faith and politics remind me of the interconnected nature of this planet and universe. Only when we come together in communities of church or government or something else can we solve the big problems and ensure that we all can flourish. This connection leads us to deep respect for our environment and how we use the resources of this earth in responsible ways. There is so much here but I think you get the idea. I see so much overlap between my Scriptures, my church life, my political life, and the best hopes of the Democratic Party.
Hope that Overcomes: The best political speech and the greatest political leaders always address what is broken and the repairing work we must do but they also lift us up with the greatest hopes of America and our democracy. We leave knowing we can overcome all the ills and the dreams can come true. We know that together, we can make for a better world.
My Christian faith does the same thing. Our greatest preachers touch deeply on the brokenness in our world but remind us that we are created in the image and likeness of God, unconditionally loved. Following in the ways of Jesus we can overcome. The best political and religious leaders mobilize us “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8) OK, it is worded a little differently in progressive political speeches but in the same spirit. The suffering-death-resurrection of Jesus is less about a moment of being saved and more about the hope Jesus brings, showing us the best way to live with hope through the worst human situations, the most excruciating suffering, and even death to find hope, a new day, even new life. Jesus shows us the path to live in love and to how we can help bend the “arc of history toward justice” – God’s justice.
So why is it that we are not supposed to talk about religion and politics in the same breath? In the highest ideals, I see the convergence all the time. However, as I sat in the Wells Fargo arena in Philadelphia listening to these prayers at the end of each day, I did wonder. Do we sometimes create God in our own image?
