An Open Letter

To Senators McCain, Obama, & Biden, and Governor Palin,

As I follow this election season, I regularly hear that I am your target audience - that it is my voting group that you are particularly looking to receive this year. Yet it does not at all feel like it. Indeed, I feel quite often overlooked - and I am through.

You see, I am an evangelical. That is, I believe strongly in the power of the evangellion, the Gospel, to transform the lives of individuals, communities, and yes, even nations. In fact, that evangelical conviction is the center of my life: privately, professionally, and politically.

I am also a values voter.

I believe in the inherent value of all those created in God's image - regardless of economics, race, creed, or sexuality. And I believe it is the job those called to lead our country to protect and preserve that inherent value.

I believe in the importance of marriage, because the God of the evangellion is the God of love. Family life is the building block of our life of faith -in the many forms that modern family life takes. To degrade families with arbitrary legal definitions ("legal union," "life partnership") is to deny those families the validation of being at the center of our community life.

I am an evangelical values voter who follows the One who called us to care for the sick, the poor, the stranger, and the oppressed among us. I am an evangelical values voter who is ashamed at the behavior of the wealthy in our nation towards the poor. I am an evangelical values voter who thinks Jesus really did mean it when he said that we should love and serve our neighbor.

"God has shown you, O mortal, what is good; And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?"

I am a values voter.
It is time you listened.

-RR

F'ing Flags

A friend from another blog life posted about "the church militant", in particular about a gun-bearing color guard standing behind a member of the clergy while he preached. To which I really only have one response, one that has been bubbling in me for quite some time:
Take the flags out of our churches.
All of them.
Now.

The church is not American. The church should not ever be American. The Gospel has no nationality, and neither should the people of the Gospel. Churches out to be like embassies: each embassy, no matter what country it happens to be located in, is sovereign soil of the country it represents. Churches, especially sanctuaries, are sovereign soil of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Isn't it really about the first Commandment? American Christians have made the nation into a god, into an idol, that we look to as the thing that we trust in and rely upon. I have actually had a member say to me (about Obama): "I could never vote for him. By not putting his hand to his chest during the pledge he disrespected the flag, and that's like disrespecting God." It doesn't get any closer to good old pagan idolatry than that.

Take out the flags. Become Christians who happen to live in American, rather than American Christians.
Of course, it leaves the whole issue of what to do about the pledge and the first commandment, but that is another topic for another time.