Christian Civility

"...."Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear."

Politics, it has been said, is the "conduct of our lives in common: a relationship with all human beings that is comprehensive ...taking in all of life...and responsible...ready for choice and action....What is crucial," says Glenn Tinder, a political scientist with a decidedly theological bent, "is inhabiting, as articulately and deliberately as possible, the entire human situation--being positioned inquiringly and communally, in relation to the great problems of one's own historical era." Politics as the responsible and humane conduct of our common life.

What I want to do this morning is look at the conduct of our lives in common...our politics, if you will...not in the sense of what party we support or where we stand on the issues or how we feel about the President, but as regards the part we must play, as disciples of Jesus Christ, in inhabiting and shaping the common life, as regards what might be called Christian civility.

Now civility, on the surface, has simply to do with being polite: You go first...no, 'scuse me, you go first...no, after you..no, please! On the surface, being a Christian in the common life has often been connected with being considered "nice" to others. In fact, our New Testament lesson could be heard to encourage such a notion: an admonition about anger, no evil talk, only words that "build up," put away bitterness, wrath, anger, wrangling, slander, malice. When it comes to the common life, many believe Christians...who behave as Christians should...are nice. Not much fun at a dinner party, but nice.

In confirmation of that judgment, "Civil discourse," said Robin MacNeil as he received an award for just such discourse from Religion in American Life, "Civil discourse is boring." But MacNeil goes on to say much, much more about the uncivil tenor of the common life in these days. "To an extraordinary degree," he says of his own guild, "broadcast talk is now valued for its stridency and bombast....One person with a huge megaphone, intolerant of contradiction, just sounding off....listening only to what feeds your own anger or prejudice...thriv(ing) on intolerance for other points of view...[not needing] to listen to anyone else because [you] know [you] are right."

All of which, of course, characterizes the other perception of Christian participation in the common life: an absolutism in relation to truth and morality which admits neither doubt nor error nor the legitimate voicing of a contrary opinion. "So then," writes Paul's voice to the Ephesians, "putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors." As presumed possessors of the truth, we do just that. Christian incivility, for Christ's sake! Where in the world, between being nice and being neo-Nazi, is the Christian witness to be recognized or reclaimed in the politics of the common life?

In the first place, "To listen and speak in a way that is morally significant [says Tinder] is to listen for the truth and to try to speak the truth," the presumption being that we do not possess the truth. To be sure, we are those who have been claimed by the truth, Jesus Christ. But we do not possess him...we do not comprehend him fully...we do not grasp completely all he reveals about God's will and intention for human life. So even though we are those who have, in him, begun our pilgrimage toward the truth, at the center of Christian civility is a life of unceasing inquiry whose aim, in common with the rest of the running world, is to glimpse the truth and the will of God.

"My mentor," recalls Richard Rhem in a Journal of Reformed Thought," "claimed the only heresy was to make the gospel boring (back to being nice). I would add another," says Rhem, "--the heresy of orthodoxy, the evidence of a failure of nerve and lack of trust in the living God. It is the heresy of inordinate lust for certitude that seeks premature closure, the shutting down of the quest for truth and growth of knowledge in the magnificent and mysterious cosmos...."

So much of the bitterness and anger and wrath and wrangling and slander in our common life comes from this lust we have for certitude, which closes our minds and opens our mouths against any who are other than a mirror of ourselves. Behold the insecurity which has overtaken us as inhabitants of what still is the greatest experiment in diversity the world has ever known: the resistence of educators to thought not originating in Western Europe; the backlash against affirmative action, as though the common good is served by a return to racial division; the attitude against immigrants by those who stand on these shores because their ancestors were once allowed to step off a boat. How do we, in the common life, hold with complete trust to the God we know in Jesus Christ, while quitting our obsession with certitude, with being right, with being superior?

Christian civility, in the first place, means trusting anew the Living God whose truth has managed, inspite of our defense of it, to endure. Christian civility means living a life of such trust in the Living God, that one can dare to inquire after everything, encounter the unknown, meet the other eye to eye. To be sure, it is a probing way of life, under which all political gods--all ideological certitude--all humanly fashioned idols--will be exposed, for Christian civility is the persistent refusal of idolatry. But Christian civility is ready as well to be astonished at the truth spoken on the lips of a complete stranger. So it was for those who dropped their nets to follow an odd Galilean around the countryside. Two thousand years later, my friends, the Living God is a God of history and can be trusted still to do surprising things through very unlikely people.

But more. For Christian civility also involves a way of listening in the world. Our times are infected by what Shakespeare's Falstaff called "the disease of not listening." "You cannot have civil discourse," Robin MacNeil reminds us, "if one side is shouting at the other and unwilling to listen." But Christian civility requires more than simply being quiet while another talks (back again to being nice). In his memoir, Battling for Peace, Shimon Peres said studying the Talmud, "taught me at a young age, that nothing in the world is one-sided. If you see only one side of an issue...you have not studied it properly." How often I have listened to another closely enough to be able to refute the argument...to make my point...to assert my higher authority. What I have missed of the whole truth along the way.

When it comes to the substance of the issues of our day--be it abortion or affirmative action or racial divisions or sexual orientation or Presidential impeachment--we have lost our way in the listening, because somewhere we learned to listen for the answer rather than struggle with the complexity of this common life of ours. Blame it on the sound bite, blame it on the inerrancy of scripture, blame it on the infallible Pope. We have ceased to struggle honestly and openly with the complexity of this remarkable creation. Christian civility never ceases to be astonished and humbled by what there is yet to learn in the give and take of our common life: a listening for life's complexity.

Though I think Christian civility requires of us even more than our earnest listening to the complexity of the issues before us. Christian civility--a quality of human interaction which seeks to bear witness to God's grace toward the other in Jesus Christ--is a listening for the reality of the other.

When I think of marriages that have any hope of surviving... when I am privy to a family where parent and youth live with some modicum of mutual respect...in such households love is embodied in the way family members listen for each other--neither assuming nor presuming to know--but continuing to be astonished by the ever evolving gift of the other's "otherness." Such a listening, a paying attention, has been known to call out of you what you never knew you had to give...or allowed you to discover within your self what you never imagined could be so. Jesus listened for the least of these along those dusty roads--the woman at the well, the man at the pool of Bethesda, the soldier with a dying child, the thieves crucified on either side. Jesus listened, amidst the brokenness, for the person he knew God had made perfectly and, by his listening, he revealed what it means to be human.

Now translate that from the home to the halls of Congress or to the media or to the classroom or to the church. It is almost unimaginable because--I don't know if you've ever noticed, but-- there is a frightening and humbling power accorded us when we find that another is really paying attention...is listening not simply long enough to interrupt, but listening for us, for our substance, for our self. It is a power not freely given another in the give and take of civil duties...but it is the power Christian civility may risk, because we are nevertheless upheld by the power of him who has listened for us.

Well finally, Christian civility--because it eschews certitude and idolatry on behalf of a probing inquiry...because it tenaciously listens for the complexity of God's world and the uniqueness of God's creatures--Christian civility finally requires we speak the truth to our neighbors as those who have staked our lives on the Word (capital W) which alone sets people free and so as people who are willing to give our lives for that Word. Now there is a difference, my friends, between fanaticism--a willingness to die on behalf of a stranglehold on the truth--and an unyielding trust in a God whose mercy sets us free to live the lives we were given by God to live, no matter the risk. It is a freedom most people would just as soon live without.

Hence, Christian civility is a threat to the powers of this world, because there are no buttons to push, no strings to pull, no tricks to buy off the one who is perfectly willing to be forgotten in history, that the least of these be remembered, or some lost cause be recovered, or the credit be given to whoever needs it most. Christian civility sees the light of day only as we are freed by grace to die to our selves--and to risk death, literally or figuratively, at the hands of a frustrated and threatened world--for the sake of the truth which alone sets people free.

The name of that truth is Jesus Christ. Were it not for his life and death and resurrection, we most likely would not know how far it is our common life has fallen from the civility God intended in this historical era. The truthfulness of his life is forever judgment against the sham of our own best intentions. But the truth his life reveals is the only truth in which we may stand and by which we are saved: the truth of God's forgiveness and mercy toward everybody and every body politic.

No one rested in that assurance more completely than the man whose life bears witness still to the power of Christian civility to reshape and renew the common life of the world. On the day after the plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler had failed, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to his friend Eberhard Bethge, "I am still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman, a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. By this-worldliness, I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing, we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world....That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia....How can success make us arrogant, or failure lead us astray, when we share in God's sufferings through a life of this kind?" A life of Christian civility. Thanks be to God.

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