Sometimes when I read the news, I’m tempted, just as Jesus was. I’m tempted by the rage clutching at my heart. So like Jesus, who matched the Tempter with the words of Deuteronomy, I go to scripture. I open to Matthew 7:12. And I read these words: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”
The golden rule helps me with my anger. I could always do more to understand my disagreeable neighbor and government. It also applies to everyone else. You might’ve thought I was being radical a moment ago, saying that every dit and twiddle of the Bible is true, even the most shame-inducing, bloodcurdling parts — and it’s all about love. Please read again what Jesus said. Every book, chapter, verse, and word of the Bible he knew was about loving others as we love ourselves. So too the whole testament written in his name.
Jesus wasn’t the first to say it. It’s Confucian, too, from 500 years before the Christ event. It has its equivalent in every faith and philosophy in the world. One day scientists will find it in our DNA, confirming what the prophet Jeremiah said, which is that God wrote the law of love on our hearts. It can only have come from the moment of creation, when God was in his heaven and the living Word his daily delight.
The only way out of our political crisis is for people of faith to come together, notwithstanding differences of doctrine and belief and arguments about policy and politics — a multi-faith democratic coalition of 150 million people in our country, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and non-Abrahamic practitioners — because their leaders have swept their differences aside and realized at long last that the one thing the universe expects of us, and especially those with the power of life and death over others, is to behave toward others as we would have them behave toward us.
At long last, we’re going to insist that those in power obey the divine law of the universe.
No immigration policy with cruelty.
No foreign policy with cruelty.
No more public statements drenched in cruelty.
No policy, action, or statement that wounds anyone unnecessarily.
It’s actually a pretty low bar. It is neither liberal nor conservative. You can get away with a lot of things with the golden rule. But you can’t get away with murder and cruelty for cruelty’s sake.
Everyone knows the golden rule is the only thing that works. We can’t get through two weeks of a marriage without it. It’s astonishing that anyone thought we could run our country or the world without it. And yet faith has let kings, princes, and presidents off the hook for 2,500 years.
Only on the brink of global catastrophe does wisdom finally dawn. If someone tells you this violates the separation of church and state, they’re wrong. But if it did, we couldn’t afford the separation of church and state until the crisis had passed. Wherever you are, your church, your family, your heart, is local headquarters of a global movement devoted to the divine law of love, the golden rule, the way of liberty and justice for all, the way of peace in our time.
[Based on a portion of my Sunday sermon at St. Joseph of Arimathea Episcopal Church in Yucca Valley.]