Politics as Confession: A Sermon on Romans 10:9-10

If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. Romans 10: 9-10

In a remarkable turn of phrase, theologian Oliver O’Donovan brings us before our topic this morning: “[The church],” he says, “must be political if it is to be evangelical. Rule out the political questions and you cut short the proclamation of God’s saving power. You leave people enslaved where they ought to be set free from sin—their own and others.” What we have here is, as I said, remarkable, and not a little shocking. O’Donovan says that the church must be political if it is to be evangelical. Must? Surely he isn’t serious. A lot of us here, I imagine, would have no problem adopting the label ‘evangelical.’ We are, after all, people of the Gospel. The Gospel is our lifeblood; it is what gets us up in the morning and gets us to sleep at night. The startling news of God’s presence among us in Jesus Christ fills us with joy and empowers us to carry on in this broken world, for this broken world. I also imagine that a lot of us here would have no problem adopting the label ‘political.’ We follow the local and national news, we have our opinions about national and international leaders, most of us (I hope) vote, and a few of us even display politically charged bumper stickers. But I wonder how many of us are comfortable uttering these two labels in the same breath: evangelical and political. I wonder how many of us think that the latter is a necessary part of the former. And if there are some of us who do, what do we mean by it?

Now, to be fair, Oliver O’Donovan is not an American. When he uses the word ‘evangelical,’ he is not associating it with the social and political baggage it has here in the United States. ‘Evangelical,’ for him, does not mean socially and politically conservative; it means, fundamentally, being mastered by the Gospel, having the Gospel as the definitive and constitutive word by which the community lives. To be evangelical, for O’Donovan, is to determine, with Paul, “to know nothing…except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2); it is to be concerned with “the proclamation of God’s saving power.”

Still, though, even with this broader definition of ‘evangelical,’ are we comfortable saying that we must be political to be evangelical? We must be political to be mastered by the Gospel? Most of us, I am sure, recognize that our faith somehow must shape the way we view and participate in the political arena. Christian faith, we might say, requires us to respect human life; it requires that we be concerned with the flourishing of our society. Or we might say that Christian faith requires that we vote for those who uphold our values. But I suspect that many of us are not quite sure how all of this is connected to the Gospel. We are not quite sure how the good news of Jesus lays upon us specific political obligations. For us, political involvement is most often occasioned by a general sense of morality and obligation that comes from being generally good, hardworking people. Jesus, however, is not to us a political figure. He is not public; he lives in our hearts, we might say, or in heaven. He forgives us and cleanses our consciences, but he does not give rise to a public, social existence.

Or does he? There are a lot people who would accuse a certain segment of American Christians—sometimes called ‘Evangelicals,’ sometimes ‘Fundamentalists,’ sometimes the ‘Religious Right’—of being way too political, of making Jesus way too public. According to their critics, this segment of Christians brings Jesus directly into the public sphere, violating a core principal of our nation, namely, that religion is to have no material significance in the organization and running of the government. The place of religion is the private sphere, and Jesus is to remain there, so they say. When the name of Jesus is associated with public policy, when religious convictions determine how one runs the county—which happens with this certain segment of Christianity—Jesus becomes politicized and is no longer contained within the walls of the church, he is no longer ‘spiritual.’ This is, as you know, one of the pressing issues of our day, the relation between religion and politics. So how can I say that we in America don’t know how to connect Jesus with politics? It seems to be done all the time.

But even here, where the name of God, even the Christian God, is invoked for political reasons, even here, I think we are still operating with a de-politicized Jesus. Even where there are those who would wrap the cross in an American flag, even where there are those who would insist on publicly posting the 10 commandments, even where there are those who would portray Uncle Sam and Jesus Christ as brothers in a common task, Jesus is still very much disconnected from politics. The church is still very much a private community, even when it gets so much press.

How is this case? Because what makes possible all of this public display is an account of the Gospel in which its own political content has been evacuated in favor of a certain party politics. When we define the Gospel narrowly, like we tend to do, simply as the forgiveness of sins, or the goodwill of God, or the deepening of our spirituality, it has no problem being tacked on to all manner of political ideologies. Jesus can stand next to Uncle Sam if Jesus doesn’t have anything particular to say to him, Jesus can clothe himself in an American flag if his real domain is the ‘spiritual,’ not the political or social. The 10 commandments can easily be assimilated into the American judicial system as long as you leave out the most important part, namely, the political part: “I am YHWH your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Deut. 5:6). The point is that, in America, the Gospel is put to work politically only insofar as it is attached to a politics that emerges from a source other than the Gospel’s own content. Jesus does not form the substance of any American political system; he is there just to give some of them credibility, to give them spiritual backing.

And who is to blame? It is us, the churches, not so much the politicians. When all we have to offer, when all we preach from our pulpits, is a watered-down Gospel without any teeth, we make our faith vulnerable to the captivity of political ideology; it is easily co-opted for someone else’s political purpose. This is why we have the odd situation in America where, for the most part, actual churches qua churches are uninvolved in political matters but the government has a very religious face.

But—and here is what I want to drive home—the Gospel has its own political content. It is by definition a political message. It does not need to borrow scraps from the table of any political party to address the human situation with political, economic, and social force. You may have been wondering how the passage for today fits into this message. It does so by bringing before us the raw political content of the Gospel in a very concise formula. And I have chosen it because most of us would not think to use these phrases in articulating how the Gospel is political. What I want us to see, though, is that there are no ‘political’ verses in the Bible as opposed to ‘non-political.’ The whole Bible is political. Its politics are ingrained into the very basics of our confession, which is what we get here in this passage. Romans 10 contains what many scholars believe to be a primitive liturgical formula, something that captures the essence of the early Christian movement: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” What I want to highlight is that the Christian faith is founded upon two very political statements, namely, Jesus is Lord and God raised him from the dead.

This passage is often used in evangelistic settings as a call for personal repentance and belief, and that is no doubt a correct use. But I think these words have a broader reference, and I want us to hear them as they would have been heard in their original context. At its inception, Christianity was not so much a set of beliefs as it was a way of life. To become a Christian did not mean to assent to a list of doctrines; it meant entering a way of life in which a vindicated political criminal was considered the possibility of and pattern for one’s existence in this world. God raised him from the dead. We have made Easter about flowers and nice dresses, but God’s raising Jesus from the dead was very a political act on his part. It was in direct opposition what the Romans had done to Jesus. To become a Christian was to enter a community that had its own Lord apart from and instead of the political lords of the nations. Jesus is Lord, which means, of course, that Caesar isn’t. And what about this business of being ‘saved’? Considered in the light of the whole book of Romans, salvation is not a narrow concept, referring simply to the forgiveness of sins. Salvation, for Paul, is apocalyptic; it is cosmic. It has to do with our individual sins, yes, but only as those are part of a much bigger picture that includes all the forces of evil and destruction in the world. Salvation is about new-creation, forging a new cosmos, a new world order. Confessing that Jesus is Lord can only be done with our mouths because it is a public, political statement. It is about the new world order that has emerged in Jesus. To be saved requires that we renounce the forces of evil and enter this new world, and that cannot be a private act. It is a political act.

The Gospel has its own political content; the Gospel itself has things to say about the ordering of corporate human life, things that radically challenge what we take to be the status quo; and the Gospel is betrayed when it is attached to a foreign set of political commitments. My goal, however, is not to tell you how to think politically or to keep you from doing it. None of what I have said decides ahead of time the best position on any given political issue. The Bible does not tell you how to vote. We still have to do the hard work of wrestling with the issues and finding the best way forward. My goal is simply to nudge us toward re-imagining the context in which we do our political thinking, to alert us to the fact that our faith is already political from the outset, that when we confess that Jesus is Lord we are defining ourselves in a political as well as spiritual way. And the way the Gospel defines us politically is not according to the divisions present in this country. The political identity given by the Gospel transcends time and space. We are part of a polis called the ‘communion of saints,’ and so our interests fly past the borders of this country. Recognizing this can help us discern what the most pressing political and social issues are, and it can help us recognize when our faith threatens to be co-opted by ideology.

Returning to Oliver O’Donovan: “[The church] must be political if it is to be evangelical. Rule out the political questions and you cut short the proclamation of God’s saving power. You leave people enslaved where they ought to be set free from sin—their own and others.” The church must be political because the Gospel itself is political. And if we ignore this, we leave our faith at the doorstep of ideology; we cut short the knowledge that the Gospel makes all things new; we leave ourselves and others enslaved where we ought to be set free.

Amen.