“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

          For most of us, loving God is the easy part – it’s the other people who present the real problem. But it’s more complicated than that. Loving your neighbor is the test of whether the feel-good love of God in your heart is real. The person who claims to love God, but who is not moved by God’s love to love those around him, is rightly questioned as to whether he really loves God at all.

          It seems harder than ever to love your neighbor. There is so much division in our world, so much pushing us apart. There are ideological litmus tests you seem to need to pass to fit in with one group or another. It is hard to love people with whom we disagree, so we tend to retreat into enclaves where everyone thinks just like us, sees the world just like us, believes just like us.

          There’s an element of that approach that can be virtuous, especially when it comes to raising children. But to be a Christian is decidedly to be in the world – not of the world, but in the world. The world was made by God. Even the secular realm was made by God. We tend to use that world, “secular,” as a bad word, meaning something like anti-religious. But its root meaning is “the age,” the time in which we currently live. It’s where we get the word “Century.” God calls us to love the world around us, even the secular world that is properly distinguished from the Church, because He loves the world. This is why the one who loves God but not his neighbor does not really love God. If we love God, we need to love the people and the world that God loves.

          To love the world around us is difficult because what we see of that world is often so ugly. The 2024 election is in two days, but this is not a sermon about for whom you should vote. Instead, I’ll say something almost equally controversial: regardless of who wins any election on Tuesday, our country has already lost.

          That is not because of the quality of any particular candidates, though. Our country has already lost because the noble art of politics has descended into something more like rooting for your favorite sports team (or maybe more realistically, something more like professional wrestling). The blame doesn’t belong to the candidates. The blame belongs to us, for being so easily sucked into the theatrical spectacle that national electoral politics has become.

          It’s common for people to say that, faced with the intractable problems faced by our country, that we need less politics. I think that, usually, when we say this, we mean that we need less of “the other side,” because what they propose is “political,” and what we would like is “just common sense.” What if we actually need not less politics, but more and better politics? Politics is the noble art of weighing the competing goods that exist in the human condition. When we lose sight of the legitimate role of the political authority and process, we cede control of our world over to “experts” who inevitably make a god of the goods protected by their own fields of expertise.

          Thus the Church teaches, “It is the duty of citizens to contribute … to the good of society in a spirit of truth, justice, solidarity, and freedom. The love and service of one’s country follow from the duty of gratitude and belong to the order of charity. Submission to legitimate authorities and service of the common good require citizens to fulfill their roles in the life of the political community.”

          The Catechism goes on to enumerate ways in which this participation in the life of the political community takes place: “Submission to authority and co-responsibility for the common good make it morally obligatory to pay taxes, to exercise the right to vote, and to defend one’s country.” The idea of a moral obligation to vote, though, needs some clarification. The obligation to defend one’s country, in Church teaching, is tempered by the right to selective conscientious objection (not participating in an unjust war). So, the obligation to vote is not absolute either. There can be times when our conscience convicts us that no candidate on the ballot for a particular office can be supported in good conscience.

          The old Baltimore Catechism offered an important clarification: voting “is a moral obligation when the common good of the state or the good of religion, especially in serious matters, can be promoted.” Maybe there is a particular election or two that strike you as excluding the possibility of promoting the common good of the state or the good of religion. But there is a lot more on the ballot than just one or two high profile cases. Matters that deeply affect the education of our young people and the direction of our local communities are frequently up for grabs in each election.

          Even beyond voting, we need Catholics who participate deeply in the life our communities. Clearly, being a politician or a political activist is not everyone’s vocation, but we need good men and women who will be engaged in the noble art of politics and the many other institutions that play important roles in forming our culture.

          What about after Tuesday, though? How will you love your neighbor who did not support the same candidates as you? I would encourage all of us to make some resolutions before going to the voting booth:

1. Resolve not to gloat if your preferred candidate wins. Resolve not to make inflammatory claims, like the fact that he or she won has saved the country, or civilization itself. No one on the ballot is that good.
2. If your candidate loses, resolve not to catastrophize. While it is true that there are candidates who support intrinsic evils and whose plans pose serious obstacles to living the Gospel, no candidate’s loss or victory means the end of civilization itself. Catastrophizing – thinking that the world is ending – is what drives us to disengage from the world because of losing hope. Rather than catastrophizing, resolve to engage more deeply. Remember the words of our Lord: “In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
3. Resolve not to look at your friends, neighbors, coworkers, etc. through the lens of an opposing team. Ask yourself whether you are thinking about the noble practice of weighing competing individual goods in pursuit of the common good, or whether you are reacting to something that looks more like a theatrical athletic event. Or, as the anti-Communist Russian dissident Aleksander Solzhenitsyen put it, reflecting on the fact that he easily could have been one of his own torturers, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

American politics has become so contentions in part because people are looking for a secular savior. This trap has even caught many people of sincere Christian faith, who are taking on a narrative that we ought to resist, because we already have a savior. Christ’s teaching about love of God and love of neighbor took place on Holy Tuesday – only three days before His ultimate act of love for us on the Cross. He is teaching in the Temple, the place of sacrifice. Thus, when the scribe tells him that the intense love of God that he describes “is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices” he is making a very bold statement. They stand right within the precincts of the temple, surrounded by the bleating of goats and heifers being led to ritual slaughter, the chanting of prayers, all the hullabaloo of the bizarre marketplace / place of worship that was the ancient Jewish temple. And all of it – all of it – the righteous scribe affirms, is worth nothing in comparison with the complete love offered by Christ.

Whatever happens on Tuesday, loving the Lord, and loving your neighbor, is worth more.

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne

XXXI Sunday through the Year, A.D. MMXXIV