Words delivered within the political sphere are designed to make us feel something so that we will then do something. And we are feeling deeply in 2024. As James Davison Hunter observed several decades ago: “Both Right and Left, then, aspire to a righteous empire.” Whether one votes more conservative or liberal is not at issue here; rather, we must begin to notice the form of the messaging we receive. While there are real differences in voting and values on the political left and right, each also has its mode: its own tone and own unique ways it makes arguments and garners attention, ways it motivates constituents.
It’s easy to dismiss the form of a message as window-dressing: something that might spruce things up but not ultimately change what’s in front of us. But form isn’t incidental, it works in a subterranean way in the same way that you feel differently when you walk into a friend’s cozy candle-lit living room versus into a Holiday Inn.
How we communicate the Bible — not just why or what we communicate — then, has ramifications for our spiritual formation, especially when we are curious about the origins of our national fracturing and what the church might do about it. Most often, we are tempted to downplay form or to capitulate to emotional manipulation or partisan tribalism.
It’s easy to see “us” versus “them” play out on a political stage. The church is no stranger to this demarcation. It can look like fidelity to God’s Word — but neglect sympathy or concrete acts of care and mercy in one’s neighborhood — so that the people of God separate themselves from the surrounding culture. The law then is wielded as a hammer; yet it is “kindness that leads to repentance” (Rom 2:4). In a similar move but different style, emotional manipulation will appeal to a group’s felt needs and sensibilities. These are good things but if taken too far can reduce the complexity of and flatten God and his word so that he only serves the problems of the day, in the language of the day.
Like the ends of a horseshoe, we find that emotional manipulation and partisan tribalism actually come quite close to one another when we think of them less in terms of a line between right and left and more as ways of being. Both are ways for groups to stay in echo chambers and distance another group as being “other.” Both presume coming to a scriptural text with all the answers stacked in one’s favor, without a generous posture toward the imago dei in another human being. The results of partisan tribalism and emotional manipulation seem to lead to either a retreat into a Christian subculture or to lack boundaries between Christian belief and practice and “the world.” Ultimately, both modes deeply lack humility and character. Neither option will be the way forward for a church and culture in crisis. God’s people may neither wield their salvation as a mark of superiority nor use it as a reason to resist contact with a world in need of grace and mercy.
We need not only a call to the facts of the gospel, but a form that fits this radical nature of God’s kingdom. While an already exhausted 20 percent of pastors reported a decrease in job satisfaction in the last several years, it can seem at times the task of Christian formation, discipleship, and preaching may seem too large or that we’re doing too little too late. Where does this leave the preacher week in and week out, when caught between warring factions in one’s church or on one’s newsfeed?
The great call of preaching the gospel, and being formed by it in the pews, means for us to engage all of ourselves in the preaching or hearing of God’s word — our wills, minds, and bodies. The call to belong to Jesus isn’t on one part of our lives, but
all. Christian teaching and preaching does not settle for modes of emotional manipulation or partisan tribalism — both of which are just easy ways to subvert the gospel in favor of a culture war. Both quick ways to create “in” and “out” groups, to sit back in smug self-righteousness. Instead, Christian teaching and preaching ignites the imagination while keeping us humble. The task of all of our discipleship efforts is to do our
small parts to ignite the imagination so
that we are moved toward God and toward his kingdom.
Let me give you an example. In Ezekiel 37, God shows Ezekiel a vision: the valley of the dry bones. God tells him to “preach to the bones.” Ezekiel preaches and the bones clatter together. As he preaches, sinews and muscles appear; the skeletons become covered with flesh. But they are still lifeless. God then tells the prophet to call for the wind.
My husband, ordained as a pastor for the last 17 years, recently preached on this passage, and you could see the passage make its mark on him even as he shared it, his eyes a bit wet from the mighty work of God. You could hear him slow down to relate the story of God’s word, taking it bit by bit to explain how the same word is used for “wind,” “breath,” and “spirit,” to trace the presence of the Holy Spirit in creation to his coming at Pentecost, and to remind all of us that there is nothing so dead to which the Spirit cannot bring unthinkable, joyful life. This invitation is for all of us.
A preacher’s job is not to bring life, but simply to preach and to call for the wind — to humbly implore the Spirit of God to do what only he does: to bring life. Likewise, a leader’s job is clear: Preach to the bones, call for the wind.