Family and Politics

Sermon given to Central Christian Church of Great Falls, MT on December 18, 2024. See YouTube here.

Howdy folks, my name is Leigh Larson. 

Thank you for joining me today. I am relatively new to Great Falls and seek ordination through the Disciples of Christ denomination. I was here a month ago, then traveled, had finals, and now I am recovering from being ill. I am thankful to be back here this evening in this lovely community. Tonight, I will be speaking on navigating loved ones and politics. 

Before I begin, I need to introduce myself. After starting in the Episcopal church, I was raised primarily in University Christian, a DoC church in Fort Worth, Texas. My mother moved us from Houston to her hometown of Fort Worth following her divorce. She served as a Stephen’s minister – a lay minister – for the St John’s Episcopal in Houston, but the conservative archbishop of Fort Worth stripped her of her title based on her gender. She attempted to continue to attend Episcopal services until that same archbishop delivered a sermon about submitting to the husband, and she pulled my brother and me by our collars and walked out mid-speech.

I attended the University of Texas at Austin, where I studied International Relations, African studies, and Environmental Sciences, and studied in the Thomas Jefferson program, ‘Core Texts and Ideas’. I served on student government, participated in the UT Outdoor Recreation Club, and graduated as a Presidential Scholar. I aimed to be a lawyer and go into politics, but after interning at the Texas Senate and working for a major criminal defense attorney who defended high-profile people, such as those same politicians in the Senate, I lost the motivation and went into ministry.  

I served in the USAFR Chaplain Corps and at Central Christian DoC church in Denver. Due to personal and financial circumstances, I walked away from seminary and went into tech, and I now run a web and graphic agency. My dog, Professor Huckleberry, and I travel the country in our free time. I have written two children’s books narrated by my dog as he teaches kids about American history and national parks. Following my divorce, I returned to seminary to finish what I started. While I seek ordination, I do not plan to be on any religious institution’s payroll in the future. 

When I returned to seminary, one of my classes asked me to write an autobiographical essay to ground my identity, and another asked about my audience. Who am I, what are my beliefs and values, and who do I minister to? The professors were staunch that we must know ourselves and our audience to maximize efficiency and spiritual caregiving. 

It is a common platitude that we ministers like to say that we minister to everyone and that all are welcome at our table. In a way, we do. Everyone who comes through our doors is welcome to sit at our table and pews, and to listen and share in the Lord. No one will be rejected unless they are physically threatening or disruptive to a meeting. We will always offer shelter, food, prayer, support, or clothing to those who seek it.

Today, I speak on Matthew chapter 10, in which Jesus sent out his 12 disciples and gave them authority to heal, preach God’s word, and denounce injustices. I will also refer to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. 

I speak from the Book of Matthew in light of our political division. Chapter 10 primarily concerns Jesus tasking His followers to go out into a divided world and how to handle foes and challenges. 

And that is precisely what we will discuss today. 

What shall we do with family members and loved ones with values that clash with our own? What should we do when they denounce us for having different ‘opinions’ than they do?

Many of us aim to be spiritual, righteous, loving, and kind. And in that goodwill, we find ourselves at a crossroads with our loved ones. We bury our anger and aim to keep the peace, either in the name of Jesus or for our own comfort. 

But in doing so, we repress righteous, sacred anger, and we do not have peace within ourselves. We betray ourselves when we remember parts of Scripture but forget the rest. Jesus often acted on righteous indignation. He flipped tables over it. At times, anger should be tempered; other times, anger is the soul’s way of alerting us to an injustice. 

In Matthew 10:34-36, Jesus says, “Do not suppose I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father,  a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.”

And it is here, I say tonight that if I claim that all are welcome, but the wolves come through those doors, my sheep will be nowhere to be found. 

Because I can’t minister to everyone. I can’t stand at a pulpit and expect my values to be shared by everyone. My words will resonate with some more than others. Take what you need and leave the rest. And if nothing resonates, you are free to leave.   

If I remind folks that women were burned at the stake at the hands of clergy, lawyers, and political leaders as justified by the King James Bible, I will be dismissed as a hysterical woman.

If I sermonize on Harriet Tubman or Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and I have Ku Klux Klan members in the audience, they will either protest or leave.

If I speak on the killings of Matthew Shepherd or the Pulse nightclub shootings, I will be met with opposition or blame. 

If I call out the hypocrisy of nativity scenes built by those who praise the birth of Jesus, the son of a brown-skinned refugee mother, while those same people publicly support mass deportation, I will be met with anger. 

If I explain that progressive churches generally do not endorse specific political parties and candidates because the first place Hitler and his Nazis sought support was from churches that intertwined nationalism and religion, I will be met with denial that anything like that could happen here in America. 

Suppose I point out the wealth and healthcare inequalities and tax loopholes and cuts of the rich while those in poverty can’t “pull themselves up by their bootstraps’. 

Suppose I ask, “Why do we need so many nonprofits when we are the wealthiest country in the world?” 

Or suppose I ask, “Why am I serving in soup kitchens for the starving when Walmart exists?” I will be ridiculed.

What I call systemic injustices is what others consider warranted, justified by damnation and hell. 

When we pledge allegiance to one nation under God, we must ask ourselves, who’s God? Because my God was killed by the State and those in power for speaking out against unjust legalism, perverted religion, and oppression.

When we stand up for ourselves and others, we stand against someone else. That is inevitable. We may feel shame for betraying or hurting others in our defiance, but I must ask us, when have we betrayed and hurt ourselves? 

All those times we showed up trying to convince them to change their values, we weren’t honoring our own. 

We weren’t building a better world. We weren’t organizing with others. We returned to individual battles and lost every time by playing the same strategy. 

We got off on the victimhood, it made us feel self-righteous. We were fighting for the sake of fighting sometimes. Yes, we were defending ourselves and loved ones, but was anything getting done?

We were delusional to think we can change someone’s core values just as they think they can change ours. 

And in that, we betrayed ourselves. We betrayed our own sense of safety by running back to what was not safe long after we communicated our wants and needs to people who didn’t care to hear them. 

I recently lost the support of some of my family members regarding politics. The words were not kind, and letting them continue to watch and judge my personal life on social media felt uncomfortable and emotionally unsafe. 

Not long after, I received a request for my web and graphic services for an elected official’s re-election campaign. I rejected the proposal, stating my values didn’t align with theirs, but wished them luck and offered to help with any graphic needs for their private business outside of politics. I was scared to deny this request – my divorce and subsequent $30k plumbing issue have been costly, and I really need the money. But I knew it was better to stick to my values than to wrestle with the sleeplessness of dirty money.  

In Matthew 5:39, Jesus says, ‘If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other cheek.’

Sometimes, the peaceful and loving act is to take a step back or to walk away, instead of forcing something that ends in tears, anger, and pain. Will we be separated forever? That is in God’s timing. But for now, my God suggests that I turn the other cheek. 

This line from the Sermon on the Mount has been interpreted ad nauseum, but today I want to offer the interpretation that helped me navigate such darkness of loss and antagonism. 

When God calls us to turn the other cheek, I do not claim that God calls us to allow for more abuse. I claim that by *turn head dramatically* turning the other cheek, we are then forced to turn our eyes *point to eyes* on what God *point to God* would have us see. 

We turn away from the people, places, and things that either harm us or no longer serve us so that we can have a new perspective on where we are to turn our attention. 

Matthew 10:13 says, “If the home is deserving, let our peace rest on it; if it is not, let our peace return to us. 14 If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that place and shake the dust off your feet.” 

When I turned my cheek away from those who hurt me and my fellows, I didn’t invite more conflict and abuse. Instead, I turned my eyes toward service, to life-giving opportunities, to meaning. I found my tribe, and after a long election season, we may have lost the battle, but our constitution is still standing, and we have not lost the war. Take this period to be with those who value us and need our power. Do not give our power to those who devalue it. 

In Matthew 10:5-6, Jesus says, “These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

I didn’t add more harm by sending off that fire-y, insulting, or mean text. I didn’t attempt to exert my power by trying to have the last word. I simply left the group chats or said, “This isn’t working for me. When we said XYZ, I felt XYZ, and I cannot do this to myself anymore. Thank you for your love over the years”. When invited by them to attend their gatherings, I simply said, “I have other plans, thank you for thinking of me” repeatedly until they got the point. 

There are many peaceful ways to handle negative situations that don’t add more harm to what has already been done. Take what energy we do have, and leave in a way with our integrity still intact. Not necessarily because they deserve it, but because we deserve to sleep at night without regret. 

We live in a small town, and we may likely cross paths and have to work with one another — as stated, we do not add more harm, just simply pull back our energy, or state that our values are different, and treat them with kindness at the next interaction or meeting. 

When I turned my cheek, I turned my eyes and attention to service and to my own community. 

Service is what God asks of us and it adds value to other people's lives; secondly, all those volunteer hours are hours spent thinking of other people's problems and not my own. 

There are 250 non-profits in this county. Any one of them, whether it’s tutoring first graders through GF public schools, serving a warm meal to the unhoused in the winter, helping recovering addicts at Sober Life, cleaning up trails with Wild Montana, helping women veterans at Grave Haven, or any other possible thing we can think of, are looking for volunteers and board members. 

If we are already involved, we can dive deeper. If we find a role has run its course, we can shake it up and find another. 

I urge us to find an ally and volunteer with them. I encourage us to go out in twos or threes and commit to volunteer work and serve God to make a better world. 

I ask us to consider running for office, joining a board, publicly educating and advocating through writing or speaking in the day of blogs, YouTube, and social media, committing to a few volunteer hours, or donating to causes you care about. Take our righteous anger and do something constructive with that energy. Go out in the world and do God’s will.

Do the thing that fills our cup, and pour the excess for others. Stop pouring ourselves into the cups of those who splash it back in our faces. There are far too many people who are thirsty, for us to be so wasteful in giving to those who don’t care what we have to offer.  

I turned my cheek and I turned my eyes to the communities that did embrace me. The people who did show love. Our brains are wired to look for enemies and threats, but may our new perspective show us love. May we feel the energy of love and the life buoy of support in a sea of foes. May we know who has our back, who stands shoulder to shoulder. Deepen those bonds. Those bonds are now our brothers and sisters in arms in this holy, sacred war. They may not look like the community we imagined, but it is precisely why we must allow them to fight with us, not run from them and isolate. 

Jesus may or may not have imagined dining with sex workers and tax collectors, but they were who He found and who found Him. Jesus was not only the Good Shepherd, but he was a leader of the misfits of the status quo. Allow ourselves to embrace our fellow misfits and outsiders who are willing to stand for us and by us. Form coalitions and work with like-missioned groups, even if you do not agree with one another 100%. Now is not the time to get selective about where love and allyship comes from. We need all we can get. The left cannot afford to eat its own right now.  

Putting ourselves and others in harm’s way is not a loving act just to maintain a relationship that isn’t solid or safe. We do not have to martyr ourselves for those who betray our humanity. We can keep ourselves safe, and take refuge in our God and in those who God sends our way. 

We do not have to betray ourselves for the price of eggs. We do not have to justify our anger of begging for crumbs while others defend the corrupt keepers and bakers of hoarded loaves. Make no mistake – when Jesus freely gave bread and fish to the starving multitudes and showed them the way of love, light, and hope for themselves, the Romans used bread and circuses as a distraction for political gain. 

I invested my energy in life-giving actions and service and deepening my bonds with people who shared my values, not in changing the minds of those who have theirs made up. They are God’s children, and I wish them love from a distance, but God is calling for a better world to be made, and we must honor that call. Do not be dismayed by this election, be galvanized.  

In Matthew 10:16-22, Jesus says, “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Beware of them, for they will hand you over to councils and flog you in their synagogues; and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them and the Gentiles…

”…and you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.” 

Jesus knows we will take a beating, but He asks us to remember our fellow Disciple allies, heal, and care for the afflicted and needy. He tells us not to go to the places of closed ears. He warns us that this will not be easy. 

We turn the other cheek so that our eyes are watching God. 

Amen.