Reaction to the Elections

So, we've had the latest round of European and local elections, and I thought I'd post my initial reactions having had chance to take in the European results this morning.

 

The BBC have been very keen to push how well UKIP did in the council votes, despite the Greens being better represented in local government. In reality, Labour saw the most gains nationally, with the Tories and the Lib Dems taking big hits. The Greens faired well, and UKIP ended up with a similar number of councillors but with far less influence overall, though, in terms of council control. I cannot pretend I'm happy about seeing an odious party such as UKIP doing as well as they did, but it's hardly the earthquake the BBC seem so keen to make it out to be. Moreover, it seems their new councillors are already showing their true colours, so one does wonder how long many of them will last...

 

I must admit that I find the whole Europe affair depressing to say the least. We've seen far right parties, who make UKIP seem nice and fluffy, win in France, Denmark and Austria, and a far left party win in Greece, as well as strong votes for other obnoxious groups such as Golden Dawn in Greece and a neo-Nazi group in Germany. In Poland, there was a sexist and racist anti-democracy nutter whose party managed to get four MEPs elected. For a breakdown of results by nation, check out this useful Guardian summary page. It seems that Europe, with some exceptions like Germany which was still dominated by the mainstream parties, and Italy where the governing centre-left party triumphed in style, is lurching to the extremes, in particular towards far-right, anti-immigration, anti-Europe parties.

 

Predictably, there have been calls for Labour to focus more on issues such as immigration in order to try, once again, to out-UKIP Farage's party and get the votes of those who voted for him. I hope that Ed Miliband has the courage to resist the pressure and not join a rush to hammer a group (immigrants) that are already seen as an easy target for politicians wanting to appear 'tough', though sadly I think I may be somewhat optimistic. It seems that, of the five main parties who now make up our domestic political landscape, it's only the Green Party who're offering an alternative perspective on things. It presents a challenge in particular to Christians: what can we offer in these debates about the direction of our country that offers hope to people, rather than rushing to take everything down to the lowest common denominator?

 

When preparing to preach yesterday, in a Methodist church in the one part of Milton Keynes that returned a UKIP councillor, I was originally going to talk about how we in the church can engage effectively with contemporary culture. However, the more I looked one of the lectionary readings, and having come across a story of a UKIP council candidate in Croydon saying she'd joined them because she felt they are the only party standing up for Christianity (presumably by opposing equal marriage), I was prompted to think about what does actually form an appropriate response (note, I'm not claiming to be making the appropriate response!) to the kind of politics of fear we've seen being pushed in these elections. The result is the sermon I've reproduced below, which I think annoyed some in the congregation (one woman in particular seemed furious!) but after seeing the European results and the rise of the far right needs to be said. All feedback is welcome!
 

This isn’t the sermon I intended to preach today! You see, when I started out preparing at the beginning of the week – and looked at the lectionary readings – I decided that I was going to talk about how we engage effectively with modern culture. I’d finished drafting my order of service by Monday evening, and as the passages were very familiar to me, I figured I wouldn’t need to spend too much time delving into commentaries and studying them, in order to prepare my sermon. I was, therefore, quite convinced I was in for a nice, easy week. However, the more I looked at the readings I’d originally chosen, the more convinced I became that God was asking me to take a different tack, and wrestle with something all together harder. Thus, Paul preaching in Athens became the famous passage from Micah, a few tweaks were made to the order of service, and off I went reading up on 1 Peter, a text which poses a very difficult question: what does it mean to be willing to suffer for doing right?

As I guess it doesn’t take too much effort to imagine, I’m quite an opinionated person and a bit mouthy on occasion. I’m willing to write to my MP or other public officials if something’s annoyed me, or to pull apart someone’s argument on my blog if I think it deserves it. As well as writing, I’ve occasionally been known to pipe up in discussions and meetings, saying what I think needs to be said, even if I know it’ll annoy people. So far, so good, perhaps; yet, to tell the truth, I’m a bit of a wimp at heart. I don’t like physical pain of any sort, I’m not too keen on standing out from the crowd unless I really have no choice, and actually, if I’m honest, I quite want people to like me. Thus, studying our passage from 1 Peter proved hard going, as the author talks about being willing to suffer for doing right, just as Christ suffered to free us from sin. I have to admit that it made me feel uneasy, yet that’s the challenge that both readings pose to us.

It’s generally accepted that 1 Peter was written from Rome to a scattered group of churches, containing both Jewish and Gentile Christians, who were having a hard time for refusing to go along with aspects of local culture, such as attending sacrifices. It was probably carried along the route through Asia Minor – modern-day Turkey – suggested by its opening verses, and it seems that Silas, who also accompanied Paul on some of his missionary adventures, might’ve been the messenger. There’s some debate as to whether Peter’s the author, or whether it was written by early Christians influenced by him; using prominent people’s names pseudonymously was pretty common at the time. Either way, images of God’s rescue of Israel from exile in Egypt are used throughout, reminding people of God’s care for them, and a key theme in the text is how Christ’s death and resurrection have fundamentally changed the world, and so are worth suffering for.

When we pick up the argument, the author’s been using examples from everyday domestic life to offer advice on how people should conduct themselves in a hostile environment. In verses eight and nine, they’re encouraged to love and respect one another, being willing to do what’s right even if it’s costly. In a reminder of Jesus’ teaching on loving enemies in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:10), the people are told not to repay evil with evil, but instead to respond by blessing those who’ve wronged them. The quote in the middle of the passage is from Psalm 34:13 – 17, and again it focuses on God’s call to live righteously, to seek and pursue peace. The final section of the text argues that even in the face of misunderstanding of their Christian faith, and aggression brought on by fear, the churches shouldn’t be intimidated or respond in kind. Instead, they must be ready to explain why they have the hope they do, gently and with respect. Verses seventeen and eighteen capture what the basis, the foundation, of that hope is: that Christ suffered and died to free us from sin, and was raised from the dead by the power of God, made alive in the Spirit.

The more I think about the latter verses in particular, the more this seems like a very timely reading to have, in the aftermath of the recent local and European elections. Whatever our political allegiances, we need to be wary of attempts to use fear and scaremongering to seduce us into voting one way or another. I don’t know if anyone saw the UKIP poster that had a National Lottery-style finger pointing outwards and suggested that millions of EU migrants are coming here seeking to take British workers’ jobs. It’s part of a very worrying trend, as these sorts of campaigning methods work by tapping into people’s insecurities during difficult economic times. Just as the early Christian recipients of 1 Peter were feared because they were different from those around them, the temptation is to scapegoat, to lash out at others, rather than to stick together and do the right thing by our fellow human beings. How we respond to scaremongering, and whether we have the courage to seek peace and pursue it, as Psalm 34 puts it, is a test of our discipleship.

Being willing to go against the grain and challenge popularist thinking isn’t an easy business, yet as Christians we’ve got a vision of hope to proclaim to the world, which has its foundation in the fact that there’s no such thing as a person that doesn’t matter, because there’s nobody who isn’t made in the image of God, and nobody that Jesus didn’t die for. Fundamental to John Wesley’s understanding of his faith, which he proclaimed up and down the country and even in places like my home town of Preston, where he got a good pelting with stones for his trouble, was that all can be saved; in other words, there’s no-one outside the scope of the love of God. If that’s really true, then it has major implications for how we live and act in the world, and in particular how we engage politically. If we have the same hope within us as Wesley did, we too need to be ready to give an account of it when called upon, which includes when we see people pushing prejudice, and to do so with gentleness and respect even if we’re met with ridicule, hostility or violence.

Our Old Testament reading concerns a community who were meant to live in hope and to be a light to the nations, but instead had turned away from God. Micah’s confronting a divided Israel and Judah, whose society and values embodied inequality and injustice, and showed a failing to follow through God’s command to care for the foreigner, the orphan and the widow. The same people believed this fundamentally didn’t matter as long as they kept their worship going and offered the prescribed sacrifices to God. In the first part of chapter six, God acts as judge of the people through Micah and reminds them of how he saved them from oppression in Egypt. It then moves into our reading, which asks about the heart of what God requires from his people. It’s not burnt offerings, even of the best possible produce in huge volumes, nor is it to go along with the practises of other nations and indulge in child sacrifices, but instead it’s to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with God. As much as anything else, this means the care for the vulnerable and outsiders that shines through in the Law, and was later to be embodied by Jesus.

Taken together, then, our readings challenge us not to get sucked into a way of being that responds to legitimate worries when money is tight and jobs scarce by giving into fear and resentment of others, or simply burying our heads in the sand and retreating into a church-shaped bubble. Negative campaigning relies on being able to stir up fear and suspicion of ‘the other’, whether that’s immigrants, or asylum seekers, or disabled people, or the unemployed, or the working poor, or Food Bank users, or single mothers, or teenagers, or gay people, or transgender people, or Muslims, or black people, or Romanians and Bulgarians, or whoever the latest fashionable victims are. Our hope as Christians, by contrast, centres on the love of God being universal, meaning there’s no such thing as a person that doesn’t matter. Giving an account of this hope to those who demand it may well prove costly as it was for the readers of 1 Peter, but the challenge cuts to the core of our faith.

After all, Jesus wasn’t crucified for preaching motherhood-and-apple-pie, or for being a nice guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. We follow a crucified God who challenged religious and secular authorities alike when they sought to exclude the poor, the vulnerable, the broken and those whose lives didn’t fit the social and moral expectations of the day. We follow a crucified God who embodied a radical love that welcomes all. The challenge, then, is to be willing to do the right thing, and stand up to the politics of fear and exclusion. It’s to do justice and love mercy as we walk humbly with the same crucified God who, as 1 Peter tells us, was raised from the dead and is alive through the Spirit.