When It Stops Flowing, It Stinks

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In his homily about stories in the New and Old Testament readings on a recent weekend, Fr. John Brobbey, the associate pastor at St. Francis of Assisi parish in West Des Moines, made this point.

“Wealth,” said Brobbey, who is from Africa, “is like water. When it flows it’s pure and clean. When it stops flowing, it stinks.”

His comments were partly about the reading from Luke’s gospel in which Jesus says, “Get yourselves purses that do not wear out, treasure that will not fail you, in heaven where no thief can reach it and no moth destroy it. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

The liturgy readings, and Brobbey’s homily, made a recent column by Tish Harrison Warren - a priest of the Anglican Church in North America - more relevant for me.

Burr in the Saddle

Harrison Warren, who grew up an evangelical, quotes the periodical Christianity Today that describes one of her religious heroes, Ron Sider, as “the burr in the ethical saddle of the white evangelical horse.”

Sider, who died recently at age 82, introduced Harrison Warren to a “world of Christians whose passion for God defies political and cultural categories.” Sider founded in 1978 an organization, now called Christians for Social Action, “to work for nonviolence, economic justice and the holistic discipleship of Christians. 

“For over five decades, he advocated for the poor and consistently called the church — and evangelicals, specifically — back to a biblical commitment to justice, generosity and the common good. He never shed the label “evangelical,” even as it came to be popularly associated with conservative politics.” 

Harrison Warren
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Sider, she writes, didn’t fit neatly into any fixed political category. “He was radically progressive on many social and economic issues while remaining committed to traditional Christian doctrine and sexual ethics in ways that set him apart from both parties.” 

Specifically, Sider, who Harrison Warren describes as “delightfully unhip and unbranded,” wanted Christians to be genuinely “pro-life.” He wanted them not just to oppose abortion but be advocates for the family and the poor and against war and discrimination against minorities, including L.G.B.T.Q. people. 

It reminds me of the term “seamless garment,” popularized by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernadin of Chicago but, according to Wikipedia, was coined by Catholic pacifist Eileen Egan to describe “a holistic reverence for life.”

The phrase, says Wikipedia, “is a reference from the gospel of John to the seamless robe of Jesus, “which his executioners left whole rather than dividing at his execution. The seamless garment view holds that issues such as abortion, capital punishment, militarism, euthanasia, social injustice, and economic injustice all demand a consistent application of moral principles valuing the sanctity of human life.” 

Attitude of Indifference

In my opinion, people searching for God in the Christian tradition should adopt an attitude of indifference toward current political parties, voting strictly on the issues that most reflect the gospel. Our loyalty is to God, and the search for God, not to any political party.

For me, elections always involve choosing the lesser of two evils, using the gospel and teachings of my church to make my decisions. The decisions are not always easy, of course, and require resistance to the temptation to simply adopt the views of political and media leaders and the culture’s influencers. 

But, of course, searching for God in the Christian tradition requires much more than electing the right people to office but in putting into practice a “consistent ethic” of seeing God in others and acting accordingly.

Like wealth, we should keep that flowing.