by Savas of Troas a Bishop of the Greek Orthodox Church and the Chancellor of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America
Let us rejoice and be glad in it!
Or as my late father, Skevos ("Steve") Zembillas, used to say (generally, when the stock market went up), "Wow! Isn't it wonderful to be alive today?"I know I'm taking a risk of alienating or angering or confusing or scandalizing some of my readers, those who identify the Democratic Party with an ungodly, anti-family agenda, and who imagine the Republicans are the Children of Light, but I really can't contain myself today. No party's agenda is identical with God's plan for humanity. That plan is embodied in the Church, the Body of Christ. The Body Politic is another body altogether. The only way the one can approximate the other is if the goal of government were to fulfill the law of Christ, which is to "bear one another's burdens" (Gal 6:2). "Have you seen your neighbor?" asks one of the Desert Fathers of the Church, and continues, "You have seen your God." Blasphemy? Reread St John's 1st Epistle.
The goal of government ought not to be to protect us from one another, to teach us to treat the other as competition or nuisance or threat, but to help us to help one another. I will always remember my shock when I walked into Boston's Old North Church for the first time several years ago, the church from whose steeple Paul Revere watched for the signal light. I wasn't struck so much by the starkness of the interior, the walls bare of any sort of decoration, as I was by the cubicles. Families or individuals would own their own space, surrounded on all sides by white wooden walls six feet high. The only thing visible from within the blinders of the family cubicle was the pulpit, from which the preacher would deliver God's word not to the People of God, but to godly persons. How different from the message conveyed by the great Orthodox worship spaces, such as the paradigmatic Haghia Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom of God. There, people of all ages and all walks of life gather in a wide, uncluttered space, everyone embraced from above by a dome in which is depicted the Creator God, the Father of all, the Loving Judge, who has told us through His Son that we will be judged on the basis of how we treat others, the least significant, the strangers, and not on how little we managed to disturb them. (How ironic, that the people for whom Darwinism is anathema should in their politics reveal themselves to be Social Darwinists.)
Do I expect miracles from the President-Elect? Am I confusing the man with the Messiah? Of course not. But neither is he the Antichrist, as some of his opponents would have you believe. Americans did a good thing yesterday, an inspired thing. They didn't voice their opinion, they shouted it. A new day has dawned, a day that the Lord has most emphatically made. Are you as delighted as I am? Send up thanks to the Lord our God! Are you for any reason unhappy? Pray to the same God for our President-Elect's enlightenment.
source: http://savaonarolla.blogspot.com/2008/11/this-is-day-that-lord-has-made.html
2 comments:
Did God ordain an Obama victory? You get that impression from Sava on a Rolla, the blog of Bishop Savas of Troas. In a post titled, “This is the Day that the Lord has made!,” the chancellor of the Greek Archdiocese celebrates the victory of President-elect Barack Obama in terms that can only be described as divine:
Do I expect miracles from the President-Elect? Am I confusing the man with the Messiah? Of course not. But neither is he the Antichrist, as some of his opponents would have you believe. Americans did a good thing yesterday, an inspired thing. They didn’t voice their opinion, they shouted it. A new day has dawned, a day that the Lord has most emphatically made. Are you as delighted as I am? Send up thanks to the Lord our God! Are you for any reason unhappy? Pray to the same God for our President-Elect’s enlightenment.
I don’t know. It’s almost like reading the Genesis account of Creation. OK, the Bishop’s guy won, and he has every right to celebrate. Then he goes — to put it nicely — really over the top.
The goal of government ought not to be to protect us from one another, to teach us to treat the other as competition or nuisance or threat, but to help us to help one another.
Could the Bishop be talking about those American citizens, many of whom were Orthodox Christians, who voted for John McCain? Or other Republican candidates? Or for President George W. Bush during his two terms? He doesn’t say so, but something here leads me to believe that the Bishop is doing just that.
Actually, one of the fundamental goals of government is to protect us from those who would do us harm, whether they live down the street or in another part of the globe. Read the newspaper on any given day, and you’ll see why this is so. And let’s take it a step further. As the American Founders foresaw, with God-enlightened genius, one of the main roles of government is to protect us from bad government and bad rulers
Finally, Bishop Savas tips his hand with this parenthetical dig:
How ironic, that the people for whom Darwinism is anathema should in their politics reveal themselves to be Social Darwinists.
That’s it! The people who voted for McCain are knuckle-dragging, cross-eyed rubes waiting to storm the educational establishment with mandatory Creationism curricula. Right after they dismantle the welfare state.
Social Darwinism, which draws from Darwinian evolutionary theory, holds that social and economic competition should be based on the “survival of the fittest.” To put it another way, Nature, red in tooth and claw.
Does this sound like a description of a Social Darwinist?:
I remember coming to the West Wing one morning before the daily 7:30 senior staff meeting and seeing Mr. Bush at his desk in the Oval Office, reading a daily devotional. I remember the look of sorrow on his face as he signed letters to the families of the fallen. When he met with recovering addicts whose lives were transformed by a faith-based program, he spoke plainly of his own humiliating journey years ago with alcohol. When a Liberian refugee broke into tears after recounting her escape to freedom in America, the president went over and held and comforted her.
If memory serves, President Bush’s critics on the Right were most displeased with his Big Government conservatism. Particularly, the medicare prescription benefit that one estimate predicted would cost taxpayers some $1.2 trillion. Say this out loud: trillion. Providing coverage for 40 million or so seniors isn’t exactly survival of the fittest, is it?
And remember when Bob Geldof, of Live Aid fame, praised Bush for his work in delivering billions of dollars to fight disease and poverty in Africa, and blasted the U.S. press for ignoring the achievement? Anyone remember that? The president, Geldof said, “has done more than any other president so far.” More from the rocker:
This is the triumph of American policy really. It was probably unexpected of the man. It was expected of the nation, but not of the man, but both rose to the occasion. What’s in it for [Bush]? Absolutely nothing.
Here’s a headline from February 17: Unpopular at home, Bush basks in African praise
DAR ES SALAAM — Unpopular at home and in much of the world during the last year of his presidency, George W. Bush is basking in rare adulation on his African tour.
Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete poured praise on Bush in Dar es Salaam on Sunday, the second day of his five-nation African tour, each compliment applauded warmly by members of the east African country’s cabinet.
Although around 2,000 Muslim demonstrators protested against Bush on the eve of his visit, many thousands more cheering, waving people lined his road from the airport on Saturday.
Banners across the route, decorated with Bush’s image against a backdrop of Tanzania’s Mt. Kilimanjaro, read: “We cherish democracy. Karibu (welcome) to President and Mrs Bush.”
Others read: “Thank you for helping fight malaria and HIV.” Dancers at the airport and at Kikwete’s state house to greet Bush on Sunday, wore skirts and shirts decorated with his face.
I can understand how Bishop Savas might have gotten a bit over exuberant when his party won. But I can’t accept the Social Darwinist canard. It’s over the top. And it simply isn’t true.
from: http://www.aoiusa.org/blog/2008/11/obama-defeats-social-darwinists/#more-352
John,
Thank you for your post and comments on Bishop Sava’s blog.
The election of Sen Obama as the 44th president of the United States is, I think, a mixed good. Certainly, it is noteworthy that within Mr Obama’s lifetime we have traveled as a society from the shame of Selma (a shame I should add was not limited to the South) to the election of an African-American as president. In addition to this, I think his election will have a generally positive effect on how we are viewed throughout the world, especially (though not exclusively) in Europe.
I agree with His Grace that “The Body Politic is another body altogether” from the Church. I agree as well that the “only way the [Body Politic] can approximate the [Body of Christ] is if the goal of government were to fulfill the law of Christ, which is to ‘bear one another’s burdens’ (Gal 6:2). ‘Have you seen your neighbor?’ asks one of the Desert Fathers of the Church, and continues, ‘You have seen your God.’ Blasphemy? Reread St John’s 1st Epistle.”
Where I disagree with him, and agree with John, is his contention that “The goal of government ought not to be to protect us from one another, to teach us to treat the other as competition or nuisance or threat, but to help us to help one another.” Here His Grace conflates a number of points in a manner that obscures rather illumines an Orthodox Christian response to government–secular or ecclesiastical.
To dismiss out of hand the policing function of the government is simply not biblical. St Paul is clear, the government is entrusted with the sword not only to punish wrong doers but also for the common good (see Rm 13.1-7).
Immediately after discussing the God-ordained authority of the government (a government hostile to Christians in general and Paul in particular) and the obligation of the Church to submit to that authority, the Apostle then begins to delineate in verses 8-10 the obligation of Christians to love their neighbor. Government, rightly ordered, I would argue, allow us the freedom and affluence to care for one another. While not perfect, there is no better example of this the US government.
While governments can and do have a role in the care of especially the weak, they do this first and foremost through the establishment of an society in which its citizens are (relatively) free from the predators among us (which I why abortion cannot be legalized–it is a threat to the life of one of the weakest among us).
This first step is admittedly a negative one–but the policing powers of the State or no less essential for being protective and preventative.
Following on its police powers, the State much ensure the equal treatment under the law of all it citizens. This means not only passing and enforcing laws against criminal conduct, but also contract law and the somewhat more mundane concern of government for commerce, weights and measures.
None of this of course will make us virtuous. But the American systems does not aim at cultivating virtue it the citizenry. Rather the US Constitution presuppose virtuous citizens and strives (however imperfectly at times) to provide them with the political freedoms need to exercise virtue without fear.
Where the American experiment seems to be breaking down is our transfer of virtue from the private realm to the governmental. We have come to expect the State to be virtuous so that we don’t have to be.
The genius, and weakness, of the American experiment it that the government presuppose strong, healthy private (as distinct from governmental) mediating structures –the family, the church, newspapers and businesses–that stand between the person and the government and serve to foster virtue it the citizenry.
But these smaller, mediating structures, have more and more abdicated their responsibilities as corporate citizens–what does the Orthodox Church do for example to counter the range of social ills in her midst–unwed mothers, divorce and dead beat dads to name only three–that plague society as a whole?
I agree with those who say that Pro-Life Christians are sometime narrow in our focus. But that narrowness of vision is not the exclusive property of the religious right. The religious left also seem disinclined to foster virtue as well.
(For example, what percentage of the Orthodox Church’s resources go to care for the poor? What percentage of the GOA’s budget is given to the poor? What do we say to men who abandon their children and the mother of their children?)
There is much in Bishop Sava’s words to reflect on. But I am worried that his post reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the American experiment and the Church’s obligation as a corporate citizen in the Republic.
Again, thank you for your important ministry.
In Christ,
+Fr Gregory
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