Saturday, May 18, 2024
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Asking more of politics than politics can deliver
What does it mean to say our cultural foundations are shaking? David Brooks finds an idea in a book by Alexandre Lefebvre, about how we see the world.
We avoid the big questions like: Why are we here? Who made the cosmos? Many of us nurture the gentle bourgeois virtues like kindness and decency but not, as Lefebvre allows, some of the loftier virtues, like bravery, loyalty, piety and self-sacrificial love.
When we (or our parents) reject our religious upbringing, we often become lonely and embattled with nothing much to stand on.
So we grasp at politics to give us the sense of belonging, moral meaning and existential purpose that faith, family, soil and flag provided to our ancestors.
But just as we must not rely on spouse, children or friends to carry us or do the work God plans to do for himself in our lives, we also cannot rely on politics.
In so doing we transform politics from a prosaic way to negotiate differences (which it can be really good at) into a holy war in which my moral side is vindicated and your immoral side is destroyed. Politics thus begins to play a totalizing and brutalizing role in our personal lives and in our national life.
Because we are asking more of politics than politics can deliver.
When I am tuned in to how God created and loves me, politics is not so seductive. Politicians endeavor to create a contract with me, while God does his business with covenants. Brooks quotes Rabbi Jonathan Sacks:
A contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an ‘us.’ That is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform.
Paul wrote his letter to the Romans after he and his Jewish Roman brothers came together for more than politics.
In Rome Paul was allowed to live by himself. Three days later he called together the leaders of the Jews. “I have no accusation to make against my own nation. So I have requested to see and speak with you. It is on account of the hope of Israel that I wear these chains.
Along with his brothers and sisters, Paul turned toward their Father. His commitment to God’s faithfulness became their commitment as well. They made a covenant with each other.
Paul spent two years in Rome.
He received all who came to him, and with complete assurance and without hindrance he proclaimed the Kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ.
We hear no more about Paul, and no more from him. Perhaps he was killed along with those countless others, victims of one Roman Caesar or another. But he had fulfilled the words he heard from God all those years (four? five?) ago: “You must testify about me in Rome.”
(Acts 28, Psalm 11, John 16, John 21)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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