Is it right for Christians to be rude about their politicians?

The apostle Paul says: I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings should be made for everyone, ²for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. Recently, I came upon a Facebook post chastising someone for criticizing Donald Trump, and used the quotation above from 2 Timothy to suggest that we should pray rather than criticize our leaders. I suggest that we have a twin vocation: to pray for our leaders, and to hold them to account. That will sometimes mean criticizing them, both in our prayer and in other forms of communication.

How might we criticize our leaders in our prayers? In the fashion of the psalmists, when they lament to God the corrupt or self-serving nature of the leaders of the day. At that moment, prayer becomes a safe place for saying the things we feel deeply but dare not express publicly.

But it is more than that. In those cries – which are sometimes so strong that they offend us deeply in a more touchy age – we call for justice and for change, not just for revenge. We ask God to help our persecutors to understand and feel what it is like to be helpless, at the mercy of powers stronger than us. We call for change.

We ask God to bring about change, but we also understand in political prayers that we too may need to be part of bringing the change into being. So in prayer we

1.      Interpret current events in the light of the great story of God

2.      Critique political actions through the Spirit’s prompting, in the gift of prophecy

3.      Act out our displeasure

There has been much debate about whether it was right to float a cartoon blimp of the ‘baby Donald Trump’ over London. Apart from the fact that cartoons and lampoons are a long-established part of the humour and political commentary of this nation, we know that the prophets of our tradition were not infrequently called to act out their prophetic words in a kind of zany divine drama. I’m not wanting to suggest that those who floated the blimp are thereby acting as the voice of God, but their humour might just serve as a prophetic warning.

Maybe most importantly, we must not use criticism to aggrandize ourselves at the expense of others. Politics is too important for that, and our words of criticism, our humour and our outbursts need to serve the common good. But I am grateful that in this nation, we have the freedom to express ourselves in that potentially prophetic way, and of course to receive the criticism that will come our way. We too, like Donald Trump, are fallible, flawed human beings.

Approaching my own death

Jill and I read Malcolm Guite's poem 'Westward' this morning in prayer, and were struck by the final words: "We watch the sunset, but we tread the dawn." Then, praying Psalm 90, my mind was drawn towards my approaching 70th birthday, and the clichéd words: "The days of our life are three score years and ten, or if our strength endures, even four score." I hope that it doesn't sound morbid to say that I often now think about my approaching death, which I want to grasp well. But it meant that 'watching the sunset' hinted to me - as I'm sure Malcolm intends - that watching for my own death, watching, if you like, for the fading of the light, is a good and blessed thing to do.

So of course is 'treading the dawn' or 'walking in the way of the resurrection'. Gerald Manley Hopkins puts it like this:

And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs.

I think that Malcolm Guite must have had this in his mind when he wrote his sonnet. But whether he knew it or not, here I now am, rooted in the present, reaching towards the future with curiosity and with some trepidation, delighting in the mixture of darkness and light that makes up our experience of faith. The accompanying photograph was taken from our balcony in South Africa, probably at the end of a thunderstorm, but it too has that blend of light and darkness, of smudge and freshness, which makes up the rough stuff of life tinged with the glory and compassion of God.

The ones we overlook

When I was a curate at Holy Trinity Cathedral, Port of Spain, in the mid-1970s, there was a little old lady who regularly joined the choir procession into Choral Evensong. In the way of things in Trinidad, nobody minded very much; she was just a part of the untidiness and unpredictability of life. She occasioned the odd titter or comment, but she almost became a member of the choir.

Her music folder was an old school exercise book, with meaningless scribbles in it, but she sang her heart out anyway, without seeming to clash with the Anglican chant. It was a little miracle of the sort that nobody notice
s, really.

Now, here's the thing. I guess that we all wrote her off as a little strange, soft in the head. Until, that is, the day when she turned up in the Cathedral Office when I was on duty, to ask for me to certify her application for a passport renewal. I discovered then that she was an 88 year old Anguillan, in complete possession of her faculties. It was we who had lost touch with our faculties of discernment and hospitality, in putting her in the category of 'harmless but strange'. Our behaviour was certainly strange, but not harmless.

How many of the saints of God have I dismissed in this way? Countless perhaps. One of the besetting sins of church leaders is to measure people by their usefulness to the institution, the programme, the active life of the church. So when Jill and I came across Malcolm Guite's sonnet for All Saints' Tide, on 'A Last Beatitude', I remembered my little old lady with gratitude, an angel sent to me by the wisdom and grace of God.

Here's the sonnet: hopefully, you'll be encouraged to buy this wonderful book on 'Sounding the Seasons':

And blessèd are the ones we overlook;
The faithful servers on the coffee rota,
The ones who hold no candle, bell or book
But keep the books and tally up the quota,
The gentle souls who come to ‘do the flowers’,
The quiet ones who organize the fete,
Church sitters who give up their weekday hours,
Doorkeepers who may open heaven’s gate.
God knows the depths that often go unspoken
Amongst the shy, the quiet, and the kind,
Or the slow healing of a heart long broken,
Placing each flower so for a year’s mind.
Invisible on earth, without a voice,
In heaven their angels glory and rejoice.