“You have one teacher” – 1 November, 2020

Human beings find it hard to stay true, to stay good and kind and humble, when they are given any amount of power. It happens in public arenas and it happens in religious and other private ones. . . Once you get that miter, or media access. . it is easier to go for . . . everything your baser heart desires. . . We are all capable of it in varying degrees. . .

People who are steady and quiet and kind. . . who do not act as if they are quite as important, or as accomplished, or as smart as they are earn our respect. We lift them higher because they stay low. They point to God. –– Melinda Reagor Flannery

Matthew 23:1-12

Even Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel offers some political guidance in his critique of the Pharisees—the pious “moral majority” of his day—who “do not practice what they teach,” instead laying “heavy burdens, hard to bear. . .on the shoulders of others” (vv 3–4). Further, “they do all their deeds to be seen by others,” practicing what we today should call political PR and spin in place of true servanthood.

We could do worse than use Jesus’ concluding punch line as a criterion in selecting our political leaders: “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted” (v 12). Would it were so on November [3rd]—as well as the long-promised eschatological election day! –– John Rollefson

Micah 3:5-12

[This text] is a highly appropriate prophetic word for this Sunday preceding our quadrennial U.S. presidential election. Like the jeremiads that our Puritan forbears sounded forth from their pulpits, Micah’s scathing words mock the misbehavior of the “rulers (who) give judgment for a bribe, its priests (who) teach for a price,” and “its prophets (who) give oracles for money” who at the same time “lean upon the Lord” while piously reassuring the people, “Surely the Lord is with us! No harm shall come upon us” (v 11).

For those offended by the harsh words of a certain presidential candidate’s pastor whose given name just happens to be Jeremiah, this text provides a useful immersion in what God really has to say about politics. The alternative OT text from Joshua 3 offers an instructive look at God’s promise to undergird the political leadership of Moses’ successor as the living God called him to lead the chosen people across the Jordan into the long-promised land. –– John Rollefson

1 Thessalonians 2:9-13

Paul in his first letter to the Thessalonians is also found offering thanks to God for the recipients of his letter inasmuch as they had received or welcomed the word of God as delivered by Paul and his fellow workers “not as a human word but as what it really is, God’s word,” which he assures them “is also at work in you believers.”

In this election time, this might also be heard as a caution to exercise careful discernment in not confusing the promises of candidates with God’s word, but humbly and carefully seeking to separate media-inspired personal political opinion from the kind of diverse judgments reached by people of faith when our congregations truly act out their calling to be communities of moral deliberation rather than polemical partisans in our ongoing culture wars. –– John Rollefson

Melinda Reagor Flannery is an assistant university librarian at Rice University in Texas and serves as an Episcopalian lay preacher.

John Rollefson, a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, has served congregations in Los Angeles, Ann Arbor, Milwaukee, and San Francisco.

Homily Service 41, no. 4 (2008): 115-122