ArticleBlog | Why on earth should we preach about politics? And if we should – how should we do it?
Why on earth should we preach about politics? And if we should – how should we do it?
Author: Andy PeckPost Date: 03.03.19
This is a question that makes many preachers nervous. In this article I want to explore some ways of framing the question which can help us to address it and to grow in confidence as preachers – unafraid, unabashed and unapologetic about our calling to be political in the pulpit.
Preaching within the Missio Dei
The first and most comprehensive frame I put around preaching is a missional one. I find perspectives built around the language of missio dei helpful, but if you are allergic to that, stick with ‘mission’. There is mission, David Bosch says, because God loves people.1 Not only does God love the world, but I find it deeply poignant and powerful to reinforce this with the words of the BCP Ash Wednesday Collect, Almighty and Everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made. God made the universe in love and wills its good in every moment of its existence – wills our good, and our neighbour’s, and our enemy’s. The primal mission of humanity is revealed in the Genesis sending to ‘be fruitful’ and ‘multiply on the earth’ (9:7) and should be read, as Walter Brueggemann reminds us, alongside the wonderful permission ‘you are free to eat from any tree in the garden’ (2:16). Both of these open up the way in which our primal sending is a sending into life, by a God who says to us: ‘Go and live!’.
The work of God in redemption, in salvation is in profound, loving continuity with the work of God in creation. We are called to preach a Word of Life, commissioned by the Lord who says ‘I have come that they may have life in all its fullness.’ If John 10:10 is any kind of hermeneutical cue for us as preachers and if we have any kind of Genesis-shaped theological and homiletical imagination, then when we are preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, we are always preaching ‘towards life’.2
