Compromise

Our scripture for you today is from Philippians 2, 1 through 11. Let us hear together from God's word. Rather, in humility, value others above yourself, not looking to your own interest, but each of you to the interest of the others, and your relationships with one another have the same mindset as Christ Jesus, who, being in the very nature of God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage. Rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness, and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

This is the Word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.

Well, good morning, church. Thanks for being here, for coming back. This is week three of faith and politics, and I haven't run you off yet, so hopefully I won't do that today. I do want to start the sermon today with a little bit of an aside from my research. It's something that I think is important. It's a cautionary tale that Jesus offers. I think it's something that the church should take hold of as a warning from Jesus, but it's just one of those things that didn't fit with any of the weeks of the sermon series, and I didn't have enough weeks to give it its own weeks, though it sure would deserve it, but I think it's important for us, and it kind of sets a tone of what we're trying to accomplish with this, and so I want to share with you. It comes from Mark eight, and funny enough, and what's happening here is the disciples are talking about how they forgot to bring bread. They're worried about being hungry. They're worried about not having anything to eat, and I say that it's funny that that was the case, because if you read in Mark up before that, it was not long before that we hear the miracle of Jesus taking just a couple of loaves of bread and feeding thousands and thousands and thousands. They should have known, having just experienced that, that as long as you've got Jesus around, you're going to have more than enough bread to eat. But in the midst of this, they were worried that they would starve, that they would be hungry, that they wouldn't have enough to eat, and so Jesus, in the midst of their discussion, said that you need, he pointed at the disciples, you need to watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and of Herod. Now interestingly enough, the disciples took this, and see, Jesus is worried about bread too.

That's not at all what Jesus was talking about. He had to correct them. What he's pointing out is that yeast can be a symbol of evil, and I get that, because I love bread and it can be evil. But what he's pointing out is an understanding that if you're not careful, evil can be like yeast, and just a little bit can infect and cause the whole dough to rise in a bad way. There's other places in Scripture where yeast is a good thing. It's all about what you put into the dough, right, on whether it's good or bad, and yeast can be good yeast or bad yeast. It's a symbol of both in Scripture, but a little evil can take control of a person's whole life. But here's the two forms of yeast that Jesus mentions with a negative inference to it, with an evil sort of bent to it, the yeast of the Pharisees representing religion, and the yeast of Herod representing government. As we're talking about the relationship between faith and politics, I think it's important for us to hear this and understand what Jesus is saying as unpleasant as it might be, because in this context what we see is both the Pharisees and Herod were trying to catch Jesus. They felt threatened by Jesus, and so they're building a legalistic case against Jesus. And what both religion and politics are doing in this moment is trying to strike fear in people. Both of those can still do that today, right? I mean, we've heard it, right? If you don't accept Jesus in your life, then you're going to hell. That's a fear-based method of trying to get people to follow Jesus or in politics. If you don't vote for this person, or if you do vote for that person, then X, Y, Z will happen and it will ruin the world. It'll totally transform the world a negative way. Those are fear-based tactics. 

What we need to understand, church, what Jesus is trying to help the disciples to understand in Mark 8 is that God is not the God of fear, and we shouldn't buy into the fears of the world to the political advertisements that try to strike fear in us to get us to do what they want us to do. We need to understand this as the church, that if we're not careful, then we can be just as bad as the politicians. That we need to offer good leaven, good yeast that causes the dough to rise in a good way, that we need to have leaven that represents Jesus. That's the aside for the day. Today, I want us to talk about compromise. Pastor Steve's already introduced it with our kids. You know, compromise in government used to be something that was a badge of honor. When there was a difficult and divisive and complicated bill or issue that we were dealing with as a nation, members of both parties would go back into a back room and they would work together and they would try to find some common ground, they would try to find some place where they could meet in the middle, and they would come out and they would have a press conference and they would announce that they have reached a compromise on this bill that gets bipartisan support in order to get it through Congress to make our nation better.

But we don't see that in our government today. And the reason why is it's considered a sign of weakness. If you compromise with the other party, then it's almost a guarantee that you will have an opponent in your next primary and the attack ads that strike fear and people will say, this person voted with that party. You can't trust them to be your representative. They don't represent your values. That's why it works today Compromise is considered a badge of weakness, not a badge of honor. I mentioned in the first week of this sermon series about some of the books and things that have influenced me as I prepare this sermon series and I talked about a podcast, you might be right, with former Republican Governor Bill Haslam and former Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen doing a podcast each week, each every season for several seasons now, in which they take controversial and divisive issues and each of them will bring in an expert from their ideology, from the Democratic or Republican ideology on it, and the two of them will respectfully listen to each of these perspectives, will ask questions of each of these perspectives, will push them, yes, but fair and honest questions trying to seek knowledge, not to shoot them down or to prove they're wrong, but to listen to them, to try to learn from them, and then after one of the questions that they always ask every guest on their show is, can you name a time in which you were convinced you were right and you ended up being wrong? And it's probably my favorite part of each podcast is when the guests answer that question. It's probably a good question for you and I to ask of ourselves as well to kind of keep us humble, to keep us reminded that we're not always right, that you might be right, but after the guests are off, then Governor Bredesen and Haslam will sit down together and they'll talk about what they just heard, and each of them will say, well, you know, and the guests that talked about this, you know, I hadn't ever thought of this this way.

I didn't know that about this issue, or I guess I just never recognized or realized it, and what they're doing is they're trying to work towards the middle to see if they're moving in a way that was unexpected, the things they didn't know, and then they try to find some common ground that, you know, maybe on this issue, whatever it is they're doing with that day, you know, maybe the place where we can all stand together on is around this. That might be our starting point, and they try to end it with that to try to offer some encouragement and something that might help us to be able to compromise, to work together, to find that common ground to stand on. It's a recognition in their lives that, yeah, you might be right, and so I'm going to listen, and I'm going to try to learn, and I'm going to process it, and to see how that fits in with my way of thinking, and I think that's one of the problems in our world today. I'm not sure that I see that happening a whole lot, especially around politics, but in lots of areas as well, that we don't listen to the other's viewpoint with an understanding that we're trying to find common ground with them. I think what happens more often, instead of listening to try to understand them, we listen trying to respond to them. We'll listen until we get an understanding of how we want to rebut what they're saying, and then we tune them out and form our response to show that I'm right, and you're wrong. We don't try to listen and understand where the other person is coming from, whether we agree with it or not, but to understand that person and where they're coming from. Here's what I've come to understand in life. This is right. When I say that, that means you're more than free to disagree with me, and we can have conversations about it, and I hope we will, but here's what I've come to understand. Neither side has it figured out. They just don't. Neither side has it totally right on any issue, and neither side has it wrong on any issue, and that rarely are things black and white when you get down into the complexity of the weeds of it all. These are complex and difficult issues by nature. If they were simple, then we would have resolved them and moved on a long time ago.

The fact that these issues keep coming up and that we keep finding ourselves divided on them means that they're just not a simple solution to it, which also means that there's room for disagreement around them. That means that we're going to see things differently based on our perspectives, based on where we're standing, based on our beliefs, but what happens is we tend to oversimplify these complex issues in order to prove that we're right or more accurately that they are wrong. I'll tell you this from my research that our founding fathers, many of our founding fathers, were really worried about this very thing. In fact, they were especially concerned about a two-party political system for this very reason. John Adams once said this, "'There is nothing which I dread so much as the division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader and concerning measures and opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our constitution.'" Adams saw then what we are living out now, the consequences of what we are reaping as a nation because he saw how it limits our ability to work together. It limits our understanding that you might be right. It keeps us from working towards a solution that benefits everyone because here's again what I believe. I believe the magic happens in our nation when we do not care who gets the credit, when our sole focus is on doing what is best for our when we fail to do that, our nation suffers. I believe that too often today our nation is suffering because of this. By the way, this is true, I believe, in any situation, not just in politics. It's true in all of our relationships, in our marriages, and in our work relationships and with our parents and with our children that when the magic happens, when we listen for understanding, when we try to get into the position of the other, especially when we find ourselves in disagreement, when relationships are involved, we need to start working towards that middle ground to find compromise, common ground that we can stand on together.

There doesn't always have to be a winner and a loser and I can't believe I just said that, but it's true. There doesn't always have to be a winner and a loser and I think we've forgotten that as a nation. In our text for today from the book of Philippians, Paul's writing to the church at Philippi and we've already established that they were divided and that they were struggling and so he's trying to find that common ground, that compromised position, that place where they can stand on it together and he begins what was our text for today that pastor Steve read by giving four if statements and it's trying to establish that if you agree with these things, if you believe these things, if you're on the same page with these things, then you can be the church together despite your differences, despite your heritage, despite the different places that you've come from, you can still be the church together. He says if you receive any encouragement from Jesus's life, if you find comfort in Jesus's love, if you find fellowship and community through the Holy Spirit, which gave birth to the church in Acts 2, and if you have any tenderness and compassion in you and how you model your life in Jesus, then make your joy complete by being like-minded with Jesus. Do you hear that? He takes the divisiveness and how they are of different minds and he says if you can agree on these four things and these are pretty standard things for those of us who follow Jesus, then take joy in this. You can all be like-minded in Christ of different minds around just about anything else, but you can be like-minded in Christ being one in spirit and one in purpose with Jesus.

Jesus who did nothing out of selfish ambition or vain can see Jesus who in humility considered others better than himself. Humility. I'm not sure we see a lot of humility in politics today, yet Jesus lived humility as a pillar of his life and calls us to live our lives with that same humility. Humility is living with the understanding that you might be right and I might be wrong. It's not acting selfishly, but looking to what helps and benefits the most. It is, as Paul said in the text, that we consider others better than ourselves. Humility is a foundational ethic of the Christian life. It is a pillar in which Christians build their life on and so let me ask you this in thinking about politics. Do you see humility? I don't. Do we see in politics a desire to look at others better than ourselves? I don't. To put the needs of others above our own selfish desires, I don't see that. A willingness to listen and learn, to find common ground, to get the log out of our own eye before we try to remove the speck in our neighbor's eye, it simply doesn't happen and our country suffers because of it.

I hear people say all the time, we need Jesus in our government. I totally agree with that statement, but I'm just not sure if we would agree on what we mean by having Jesus in our government because I think it means that those who call themselves Christians following what Paul said in our text today, modeling Jesus's life, finding comfort in Jesus's love, finding fellowship in the Holy Spirit, showing tenderness and compassion to not act out of selfishness, but in humility consider others better than ourselves. That worked well for Jesus and it's what Jesus calls us to in our lives. Now friends, I want to share a story with you that I think illustrates this and I'll just tell you this, I've kind of at my limits on politics, so I needed to take a little break, so I'm going to something that I'm more comfortable with and that's baseball. It's from a book that I've read, it's called The Baseball 100, it's a great book by the way, and it categorizes according to this author who he thinks are the hundred greatest baseball players to ever play the game. It's not just limited to the major leagues, it includes Japan and it includes the Negro Leagues and other things and each chapter tackles one of the hundred greatest players.

According to this person, he says you might disagree with me and that's okay and he doesn't say these aren't the hundred best statistical players, these are my hundred best that I think for reasons that are mine and subjective and he's okay with that, but in it I want to share with you about the his 18th greatest player of all time, Tris Speaker. Now let me just real quick, has anybody ever heard of Tris Speaker? I see three hands up. Tris Speaker was born in the 1880s, he finished his career with 3514 hits, he still has the fifth most hits of all time in the major leagues, behind only Pete Rose, Ty Cobb, Hank Aaron, and Stan Musial, you know those names. The fifth most of all time. He was also considered one of the greatest defensive outfielders of all time. He was also a blatant racist. He was a card carrying member of the KKK and he bragged about it, would show it off to anybody who asked, he didn't try to hide it. He would oftentimes rail against the north, he was from Texas, this was just after the Civil War and he would rail against the north and their aggression towards the south and he was known to get in fights, defending white superiority, but he was also a complicated human. And after he retired, he was offered an assistant coaching job in 1947 with the Cleveland Indians.

Now if you're a student of baseball, you know that your 1947 is significant. It's the year that Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier and became the first player of color to play in the majors, playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the National League. A little bit later that year, another ball player by the name of Larry Doby broke the color barrier in the American League, joining the Cleveland Indians. Now he was a second baseman, but Cleveland didn't need a second baseman, but they wanted him in the field. And so they wanted to teach him the outfield. And so they turned to their new assistant coach, one of the greatest outfielders of all time, Tris Speaker, to teach Larry Doby how to play outfield. This is what Speaker had to say about it. I've never seen a ball player with such a high potential. I get a personal pleasure out of working with a kid who can do so many things well. They work together every single day. And they developed a friendship, and their friendship grew. And when Larry Doby was elected to the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame, he took the opportunity in his acceptance speech to thank a fellow Hall of Famer, calling him his mentor, Tris Speaker. Now it doesn't change Speaker's history. It doesn't change the wrong that Tris Speaker had done in his life. But I think it offers hope for the future, that if we can listen, and that we can learn, and that we can seek to be in relationship with others, that we can grow, that it can change things. And I don't know when Tris Speaker died what his views on persons of color were, but I do know that he loved Larry Doby, and Larry Doby loved him. Buck O'Neill is one of the greatest Negro League players and managers to ever play the game. And he was famous for saying this, people aren't one thing.

In other words, he's saying, don't judge a person by that one thing, maybe by their worst moment, maybe by their political party, maybe by that one thing they said, people aren't one thing. It's something important for all of us to remember, I think, because I think that helps us to find common ground.

Thanks be to God. Amen.