Oct 4, 2020
God cares about how we love God and how we love our neighbor. God is not morally neutral which means that God cares not only about how we act as individuals but about how we as a communal body of people shape our community, nations, and world through our discernment of moral values. Yes, I just gave you the definition of politics— how a communal body of people shape our community, nations and world through our discernment of moral values. Whether we want to like it or admit to it, our God is political.
To be clear, I am not saying that God is or asks us to be partisan for Jesus’s love is neither confined to nor reflected by any one particularly human party. But I mean that the God that I know and believe and follow loved and guided that communal body of people so much that God gave God’s only son so that we might both have life and have a pioneer who shows us how to live. The God that I know and believe and follow is so political that God chose to become one of the polis, the people, in Jesus of Nazareth who is the Christ. Maybe you don’t like that word used in church. Fine. If it bothers you so much that you can no longer hear what is said then substitute it with the more churchy word incarnational for in practice they can mean the same thing.
And in our Gospel for today we meet Jesus being very incarnational...