When preaching on the Sunday before a general election, clergy are often warned to stay out of party politics and avoid saying anything that encourages the congregation to vote for any particular candidate. All I can say this morning is that, if anything I say did imply that you vote for a particular party it would be entirely unintentional because, for the first time since I was eligible to vote, I still have no idea who I will be voting for on Thursday!
I have always refused to be cynical or fatalistic about the political system and I most certainly will be voting because I think that that hard-won right of the people is never to be wasted. But I must say that this General Election campaign has tested my patience to the limit. I feel like I’ve heard a lot of empty words like “change” and “fairness”, seen a lot of superficial presentation, and heard very little of substance that has connected with my own strongly held political beliefs. For me, this has been the election campaign where important issues have been largely swallowed up by celebrity culture and where the much vaunted and endlessly dissected TV debates have felt less like a traditional political hustings than a rather bizarre version of the TV game show Blind Date.
I hope the rest of you are more positive, because there’s no point retreating into despair and we all have to believe that our participation in the election on Thursday is worthwhile and meaningful. The archbishops of Canterbury and York made a statement this week that helps us consider the issues at stake and what Anglicans need to bear in mind when they vote on Thursday. Let me quote the core of their argument:
“Our society needs a rebirth of civic values and virtues — which is why we believe it is important both to vote and to encourage people of gifts and integrity to consider public office. We can all become real participants in the common life of a society that is working hard to clarify and realise its moral vision…
We should not forget that, in spite of everything, many in the United Kingdom are still better off financially than they have ever been. The deepest challenge is how the wealth we possess collectively is to become a real “common wealth”, wealth that serves a whole population not just the powerful and privileged.
This is central to the Christian understanding of what a just and sustainable society looks like.”
I agree with them. And so I have to decide between now and Thursday which party is most likely to further those ends. But when the archbishops say that our society needs a rebirth of virtues I suppose I recognise that my disillusionment arises from a feeling that we’re currently lacking something fundamental – something upon which even the political system itself is dependent and which no government can quickly address.
When I worked in Westminster I was struck time and again by how governments are now expected to generate civic virtues while having a dwindling supply of civic virtue on which to drawn themselves. In particular, any political system requires a widely shared belief in social order and social commitment. But it feels that in our age those ideas are constantly frustrated and attacked by a culture that has become cripplingly individualistic. So many issues from climate change to education are being hampered by the consumerist mindset and an inability to recognise – and make sacrifices for – the common life of society of which the archbishops speak.
So in a fragmented, atomised society new ways are needed to form common bonds between people, to encourage people to recognise the fact that self-interest is destructive to community and that we either flourish together or not at all.
That idea is at the heart of the Christian faith because it is at the heart of the Gospel. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” In recent decades we have reduced the significance of that commandment. No one can disagree with it because we’ve watered it down to an injunction to be nice to people. But earlier Christians saw it as something very much more demanding, something much more public and political than private and sentimental.
In arguably the greatest political tract ever written, St Augustine’s ‘City of God’, the principle of love is what fundamentally divides the earthly city from the kingdom of God. The earthly city is destructive and disordered because it is characterised by self-love in which people pursue their own desires. But the heavenly city is characterised by love of God and neighbour. Augustine was inspired by the vision of the heavenly city, the new Jerusalem, about which we heard in our reading from the book of Revelation:
“See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them.”
But for Augustine, as for William Blake centuries later, the new Jerusalem was not merely a vision of a distant future. This was a city which the Christian church must work towards now, setting itself apart from the then pagan society by the radical quality of the love they shared for one another. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
That community of radical love is what we welcome Channah into today. There are still those who view a christening as some kind of magic spell said over a baby, an exorcism or some act of individual significance. But baptism is, in fact, our second birth into the community that witnesses to the God of Love. It is a sign that self-love and self interest lead to death and that love of God and neighbour lead to life. Baptism is a symbolic enactment of the African proverb “I am because we are”. So we would do well to remember baptism’s political as well as it spiritual significance. Political because it is at its heart an expression of love.
And it is not merely Christians who might point to a love grounded in religious narrative as a resource for the renewal of political life. These are the words of the Italian atheist philosopher Antonio Negri:
“People today seem unable to understand love as a political concept, but a concept of love is just what we need… We need a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love. We need to recuperate the public and political conception of love, common to premodern traditions. Christianity and Judaism, for example, both conceive love as a political act that constructs the people. Love means precisely that our expansive encounters and continuous collaborations bring us joy.”
So as we rejoice at Channah’s baptism this morning, let’s remember that Jesus’ commandment to love one another is not some limp call to niceness but an instruction to live in a way that is profoundly committed to the common good and the flourishing of all people. And let’s remember that the Eucharist we share is an expression and the very driver of that instruction to love. Let’s allow these sacramental signs of the common good to guide our political decision-making. And wherever we put our crosses on Thursday, let’s commit ourselves to the life of love that is the foundation of a politics in which all flourish.