So What Is The Role Of The Christian In All This?!?!

medium |  Bernie Sanders thinks that we need a political revolution. I think that we are going to get one whether we want one or not. And not the nicey nicey 1932 kind where we get health care and education. I want a full scale revolution as much as I want a category five hurricane, but here we are.

The sad fact is that our corporate elites are deliberately sabotaging our political system in the hope of bringing about a Pinochet style dictatorship. They have been working at this for a long time.

We live in a society where people die of easily treatable diseases and others are driven to bankruptcy by the high cost of for-profit health care. Before 1982 homelessness was so rare you needed a trained eye to see it. Now we see armies of homeless people, half of whom are employed but who cannot afford the rent in the city where they live. We live in a society where people are murdered everyday because we value guns more than human life.

Now coronavirus is heightening all the contradictions of American finance capitalism. It is no longer possible to deny that our society has become dysfunctional, almost a failed state. Coronavirus promises to do for American finance capitalism what World War One did for royal autocracy.

So what is the role of the Christian in all this? First of all we must commit to the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount. No one can live up to all that, but if we are honest with ourselves, we are not even trying. I am referring to that part of the Christian community that is serious about their faith, and exclude the greedy televangelists and their delusional followers. We have been letting ourselves off too easily. What is coming down from the pulpit that makes us OK with baby prisons, endless war, and armies of homeless people? Why do we keep reelecting politicians who enable these things? 

Why do we keep making excuses for ourselves? Our moral crisis goes way beyond electoral politics (although I would be the first to agree that we are called to participate in electoral politics).

Christians must recommit to the values of the Sermon on the Mount. No more nobody can do that, so I will just continue with business as usual and throw myself on the mercy of Christ. We have to at least try. We must put aside delusional thinking and, as a minister of mine once said, live fearlessly in truth.

So what would that look like? What would it look like if we really committed to living out the values of the Sermon on the Mount?