Last month I received a curious letter—certainly odd for me as a free citizen, who happens also to be a well-supported and unusually free steward of a great pulpit. The letter was from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and it was phrased as a reminder: as a church leader I am to remember that Internal Revenue Service regulations forbid all tax-exempt, 501(c)(3) organizations—including churches—from promoting or endorsing candidates. According to Americans United, this means no partisan preaching or electioneering from the pulpit.

I didn’t need them to tell me that I shouldn’t endorse political candidates. I wouldn’t think of using my position or this pulpit in that way—but not for the reason they cite. I wouldn’t do it because we have something more important to do here, something we do every day. Our work is to bring people together. We lean on the promise we get from our faith and our Lord, that when we come together to listen to God and to one another, we are more likely to be doing God’s work than if we were to force a vote as an article of faith.

A voting booth is a sacred space, different from the one we’re in right now, but sacred in its own way. There, alone and unwatched, you and I are given the right as citizens of this great and good country, to cast our vote. There we pull a lever or punch a card and differentiate our views from the views of others. There we force, if you will, our shared system to come to a periodic conclusion, to name and to trust a leader to carry on our civic business.

But that is not what we work to do here. The one through whom we worship said it well long ago:

And they came and said to him, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality, but teach the way of God in accordance with truth. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” Jesus said to them, ‘Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s (Mark 12:14-17).

In other words, he said: participate in both systems.

No, we don’t vote here. But we do get from here a special form of conviction, a way of looking at life’s deepest questions. Let me invite you into our sacred business, today with the specific goal of connecting that business with the election season, which in these next two weeks will reach its climax.

Most of us are fond of the notion that whenever possible, life’s playing field should be level. But at baptism we sign on to a holy covenant that tilts that field. We can trace that covenant back to the act of creation itself. We see it made particular and powerful when Moses brought the Israelites the Law in the form of Ten Commandments. And for us who claim discipleship in Christ, a covenant achieves particular hope and promise in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

That covenant tilts the field. It gives us a bias. It equips us with several presumptions we bring to life, and, in a way, presumptions we take with us into our decision making, maybe even into the voting booth.

A wise teacher of Christian ethics, J. Philip Wogaman,* has labeled these presumptions that arise out of fundamental Christian conviction:

The Goodness of Created Existence. There have been some among us, within the church family and outside of it, who, over the years, have insisted that there is something bad about creation, something to be avoided. But we stand firmly for the truth that God is good and what God has made is good.

The Value of Individual Life. Again, many have often said that real value lies in an institution or in a certain group. But we say it lies in the individual. God knows and loves every single one of us, and every single hair on our heads.

The Unity of the Human Family in God. Some people, some ideologies have claimed that we are made separate, with some better than others. But we stand on that part of the vision of the coming kingdom in which it is clear that there is one family of God, no separate and privileged tribes.

The Equality of Persons in God. This doesn’t mean, of course, that everyone is equally endowed with every gift; it simply means that, at the end of the day, all stand equal before God.

These are presumptions that inform and shape our lives. We draw them from the Bible, that great narrative of God’s actions and our responses in history. We draw these presumptions from our prayers—both our talking and our listening to God. We draw them from our living with God’s presence in Christ, literally the learning about his life and teaching, and our reflecting on it in actual experience.

And most of us we make our way in this life with another presumption: that we should love. Yes, we know that not everyone is loving to us at all times, but hold that God first loved us, loved this fragile earth into existence, loved us so much that God stayed with us one way or another—in the wind, the fire, or in the still small voice—no matter what we did.

As I said, we get this from knowing that when two or three of us gather, the Christ is in the midst of us. But God prompts others in other ways. There are universal presumptions of the good that we can see being lived by others and in other places and traditions. For all the pain, suffering and moral ambiguity of our time, we may be seeing some signs that there is an universal ethic that can be perceived and lived in this global village as never before.

But Wogaman asserts that there are also two negative moral presumptions:

Human Finitude, which limits our perception of the good. We are finite.

Human Sinfulness, which predisposes us to act in our own interest.

The Bible knows something about these presumptions, too. So does every honest person. Because of them, the field of life has another, often powerful, tilt. I guess we would say that because of these two stark truths, we have politics. No one ever said it better than Reinhold Niebuhr: “Our capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but our inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

Against that profound truth, the banal question, “Well, what would Jesus do?” gives him little credit and gives us little help.

The point of all this is that when you and I go to vote two weeks from Tuesday, we are already equipped with a kind of faith-based compass. We stand in a community with roots. We and our forebears have seen and done it all (at least if you read the Bible). We have, in our better moments, struggled to find a way to govern. But by itself that way is not what Jesus called “the Kingdom of God.” The Kingdom is more than the presumptions, more than the tilt we bring to our decision-making. The Kingdom is the outcome: a broken world healed.

What I hope you can take with you when you leave here week by week, and take with you into the voting booth, is not a set of positions dictated by church authority. I hope you’ll feel empowered because the covenant—the tilt, if you will—gives you a way of seeing how, faithfully, to make your own decisions.

Election seasons, this one especially, produce awful shortcuts. For example, it’s unthinkable, in my view, that a candidate would come here and stand in the chancel with me, as they do in some places, to be endorsed. Or, still less, that St. Bartholomew’s would send its church directory to Bush-Cheney campaign headquarters as they have requested of some churches in what, evidently, they perceive to be friendly territory.

Even many supporters of the President say that crossed a line. Dr. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention said, “When I heard about it I was appalled. It’s a direct intrusion and an inappropriate intrusion into the internal life of churches.”

But both sides play this game. Senator Kerry has been quite willing, as has the President, to appear in certain church pulpits, with pastors, to accept their endorsement. And if you believe in the presumption for good and the negative presumptions, I’m sure that the Democratic Party, if it could get church directories willingly handed over, would be glad to have them.

But again, that’s not the real problem. The real problem is the assumption that there is a direct line between one’s faith and some automatic position on political issues, and therefore to one’s vote in a particular election.

That’s a mistake both liberals and conservatives make. It’s a mistake because churches are not like that, nor are church members like that.

Churches make a great contribution to society by being places where people can figure out what it means to be human and what it means to be a follower of Christ. They are places where we try to give one another the sacred space to discuss our concerns and wrestle with the conflicts that inevitably arise between the presumptions of our faith and the messy reality of the world.

Remember that Jesus didn’t tell people what to do. He took his own stands, and called people to follow. When he taught, he told stories and asked questions. He made people do the work. His great parables usually ended with a question. Sometimes it was explicit as in the parable of the Good Samaritan, which began in answer to the question, “Who is my neighbor?” and ended: “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” (10:36). You do the work. You don’t need a pronouncement. You need a way in, to struggle toward your own conclusion.

It’s absurd to reduce people to like-minded names on a list you would hand over. People are simply more individual and more interesting than that. I know, because I’m privileged to listen to you. You are a wonderful bundle of contradictions. You would drive the pollsters crazy.

For example, we have some good, standard-issue, card-carrying, political liberal Episcopalians who are so conservative theologically that they will keep you up all night. We have a parishioner who represents more than himself who objected vociferously to our national church’s stand critical of the pre-emptive attack on Iraq. But in the next breath, he confessed that he thinks we read scripture too literally and seem to ignore the cutting edge of scientific truth. Some think we are too generous in our interfaith work; others think we are too timid about teaming up with other people and faiths, and they have left us behind for some new creation.

In our worship, with the Biblical readings and preaching and in our sacramental world view; in our Bible studies and courses, our forums, our interfaith classes; in our long experience of ministry to people in times of personal and ethical crisis; in our service to the poor and our work to build a more just society, we engage here with life’s most important issues. We learn here in a non-ideological and, let me say it, in a faith-based way.

Most of all, we take our stand on the way we practice God’s radical welcome. What divides society is the very thing we welcome here. What divides society, categories like conservative and liberal, old and young, rich and poor, black and white, gay and straight, is for us simply our human diversity. And we celebrate that diversity. One bread, one body, one holy table—that is our deeper unity.

Next week at this time, I’ll continue this line of thinking by subjecting a couple of key issues in the presidential campaign to the test of the presumptions of a Christian faith: How do the goodness of created existence, the value of individual life, the unity of the human family in God, and the equality of persons in God form our response as citizens who vote—citizens who, like all people, are limited by human finitude and chastened by human sinfulness?

In the meantime, this is my advice: Say your prayers, stay close to your own fellow disciples in the Lord, and when you hear either candidate assume too much about you, say, “Not so fast.”

If you think you know all you need to know from the web, the tube or the Times, think again.

And keep coming back here.

*A Christian Method of Moral Judgment (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976).

© 2004 by St. Bartholomew’s Church in the City of New York.

For information about St. Bartholomew’s and its life of faith and mission at an important American crossroads at Park Avenue and 51st Street, write to St. Bart’s Central, 109 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022; call 212-378-0222; or email central@stbarts.org.