Scripture casts many visions of God’s kingdom: Captives are freed, blind people see, wars and all violence cease, widows and orphans are cared for, the poor are aided, and the sick are healed. Human flourishing is the picture of whole, healed individuals living in whole, healed communities at peace with one another, creation, and God. In the reign of God, every living thing is fully reconciled, restored, and redeemed, no longer captive to systems, empires, or harmful self-narratives. The baptized live into this reign through the Spirit. We work and pray, calling attention to the places in our lives and world where God’s desires for humanity and creation are not fully manifested, or are being undercut.
Problems with political preaching
Work and prayer have implications for how the baptized enter the public square and engage in politics, including how we preach. Naming the gap between how God desires people to live together and the reality of our neighborhoods has become increasingly difficult in this polarized American climate.
New minefields have appeared in our familiar texts about caring for the foreigner, empathizing with the Canaanite woman, and Jesus’s healing of anyone. It is tempting to spend a sermon naming the ways particular American parties undermine human well-being or advocating specific policies when we see how the costs of things like childcare and medical care destroy lives. Perhaps you have a congregation in which such conversation works well.
Yet I have this concern: No politics or policy has God’s endorsement. When we offer political endorsements or policy pronouncements, we limit people’s holy imagination. As someone who works with a spiritual coalition in my city and who has been involved in policy advocacy, I am not saying that work is unimportant—far from it. Rather, I want to poke a bit at the role of preaching in our time.
In congregations of like-minded people, preaching policies of the left or right can be a winning proposition, yet it does not challenge or expand the summons of the gospel in a person’s life. It reinforces prior beliefs that our politics is the right politics for the moment. Yet the call of the gospel is always to a further horizon, urging us to lift our eyes to the hills, to remember again that God’s peace and love are larger than our own politics and advocacy.
Are people flourishing?
I would assert that a useful tool for speaking about the gaps we see between God’s imagined life for people and what we witness in our world is to preach human flourishing. When we consider the call of the prophets and the work of Jesus, we see that God has never been satisfied with people merely getting by: not in their health, not in their spiritual lives, not in their communal lives. The bar in scripture is not whether people are doing okay; the bar is whether they are growing, healing, thriving. In other words, the goal is flourishing.
To live in the love of God is to participate in the dynamic, perichoretic self-giving love of the Trinity. Such love invites us to our truest self, as the Spirit changes us and helps us release all that keeps us from life—all that stops us from flourishing. Changed hearts give us a new lens for seeing the world: If God is doing a new thing in us that enables us to thrive, God will do that for all of creation!
Another way to think about the creative, thriving love of God and whether it is fully manifested in our lives and world is to use the language of human flourishing. While it is easy to use religious language and remain in the realm of the beautifully esoteric, the language of human flourishing brings us back to the concrete. Using only the lexicon of politics and policy risks thinking that God is only on our side or that we alone have the solutions; human flourishing invites us to ask bigger questions about systems and to have our own binaries and narratives expanded.
Jesus fed the hungry crowds: What would enable the hungry in my city not just to be filled but to flourish? Isaiah proclaims that all implements of violence be beaten into farming tools: Where is violence destroying the ability of people in my neighborhood to flourish?
Considering where people flourish and where people experience the growth and thriving imagined in the gospel invites us away from simply thinking about band-aid solutions or believing we have achieved a good-enough phase in our communal life because the people in our personal orbit are okay. Flourishing sends us beyond questions of who is right and who is wrong. It summons us to practice deeper love for our neighbor, to respect the dignity (as my Episcopal baptism covenant says) of every human being. It reminds us of the many ways people in our world do not flourish, including our wounds that are not yet healed, our neighbor’s hunger that is not satisfied, and our city’s legacy of redlining.
Where can the gospel speak into our lives and communities the divine desire that everyone and all of creation flourish?
