Br Jordan Alpert

Therefore I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all of you, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God. Take heed to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you guardians, to feed the church of the Lord which he obtained with his own blood.

—Acts 20:26-28

Friends,

I have—unfortunately—been thinking about partisanship lately. I don’t have to explain how it has increasingly saturated the culture in which we live but it also increasingly saturates the church. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about: it starts slowly, with a little here and a little there, but eventually cascades into a full-throated endorsement and uncritical baptizing of a particular political platform. It is a truism to say that Christianity does not fit neatly into a specific political box but it bears repeating.

Today, St. Paul exhorts us to “feed the church of the Lord” and gives for us his example of not shrinking “from declaring to you the whole counsel of God.” This feeding must—in my reading—involve more than naked partisanship. To be sure, there are times where this will involve politics and make us uncomfortable: Mtr Kelli’s chastisement that God does not want you to have a 401(k) and Fr Daniel Berrigan’s statement that “a decent society should no more have an abortion clinic than the Pentagon” are two that come to mind.

Yet it must also transcend this and ignore the noise around us. Our faith is not all politics all the time. Sometimes we must stand athwart the culture yelling “stop!” and must never forget that our Lord did indeed found a religion. One with actual beliefs and boundaries and requirements and anathemas that is more than just a nonprofit with funny costumes that tells us to feel good and hosts a coffee hour. Declaring the whole counsel of God can be commentary on the world around us. But it must also be a reminder that we must “examine [our] lives and conduct by the rule of God’s commandments,” that we must “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind,” and, when we have fallen short, “repent and return to the Lord.”

In Christ,

—Br Jordan Albert, OCS