Speech seasoned with salt

Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone. (Colossians 4:5-6)

Towards the end of his letter to the Colossians, the imprisoned Paul asks the faithful congregation to pray that God would “open a door” for Paul to herald his message of salvation (called the “mystery of Christ”) to the world in a clear, understandable manner. Notice: Paul doesn’t just ask that the door might be supernaturally opened for the message to be preached, but that the preacher of the message might be supernaturally allowed to make the message clear and plain. I think we churchgoers today would be much more likely to pray that our dear Brother Paul might be delivered from the unjust chains of oppression than for his vocabulary when presenting the gospel, but Paul sees the two as equal in their necessity to be brought before the throne of God.

But it doesn’t end at prayer. It never ends at prayer. There has to be a response, an action. Here the action is for the Colossians to be ever-mindful of how their conversations with everyone – regardless of standing in the church – must be continuously “full of grace.” This is more than advice that Paul is giving; this is a command from the Spirit-inspired pages of Scripture.

So what does this have to do with us? I wonder sometimes how we Christians can spend hours and hours cooking up evangelism strategies and outreaches on the one hand and then have anything but gracious conversations in our churches, in our homes, and around our company’s water coolers on the other.

With all due respect to the mid and late 1990s, our nation is right now more divided than it has been in any period since the Civil War. On one extreme we have those who are showing an almost militant devotion to their avarice. On the other extreme we have those who refuse to talk about any groups or individuals of a different ideology without resorting to cheap shots about intellect and childish name-calling. Our nation is mired in an inability to discuss important matters of politics and religion - don't get someone from our ESPN-saturated culture started on sports! - without neck veins being protruded and insults being hurled.

Paul says it shouldn’t be this way with the church. Our mission is just way too important to have our people caught in the mire. These people not only make up the mission field, but they make up the church: liberals and conservatives, Tea Partiers and Big Blue Dots, Alabama and Auburn fan. As counter-cultural as it is, we simply cannot afford to be biting and divisive within our fellowship if we intend to be about the mission of saving souls and brining glory to our God.

Flatline

In my reading of current events this morning I stumbled upon the news that Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) will not seek another term in the U.S. Congress. Rep. Stupak is a nine term Democrat from the Upper Peninsula area of Michigan. While he has dealt with relative anonymity in the House for almost his entire career, he appears to have always been a somewhat popular Congressman in his district. (As American voters, we tend to hate Congress while typically voting for our incumbent Congressmen and Congresswomen...it has something to do with bringing bacon home or something like that.)

Of course, Stupak's life and career changed dramatically within the past few months. He was really the single politician who could best de-rail President Obama's entire domestic agenda (and, therefore, presidency) by influencing a handful of fellow pro-life Democrats to vote against the mammoth healthcare reform package because it did not contain language banning tax dollars from being used for on-demand abortions in the U.S. Out of our entire 535-member, star-studded, bicameral Congress, it was this unknown anomaly from northern Michigan who suddenly held an incredible amount of power.

Stupak became an immediate sensation. The GOP threw their arms around him as he teamed up with Congressman Joe Pitts (R-PA) to attach a pro-life amendment to the original healthcare bill. Conservative talk show hosts clamoured to get the old Democrat on the air. The more I read and heard about the guy, the more I really liked him. Like him or not, Stupak was suddenly the picture of principled ethics within the larger sausage-making documentary known as the healthcare legislative process, and our nation loves it when our politicians seem committed to their ethical moorings. Up until the 11th hour, it honestly appeared that Stupak & Co. were willing to put principle above party, loyalty to life above loyalty to president.

Then March 21 came. The calendar said it was the first full day of spring, that season which reminds everyone of new life. As Stupak's group of pro-life Democrats gave a new breath of life to the administration of Barack Obama, it came at a terrible cost: the death of any lingering pro-life movement within the Democratic Party. I fully believe that one day the American pro-choice movement will be derided and placed on the ash heap of our history--right there next to racial segregation and slavery--and the Democratic Party is doing itself few favors by excluding any anti-abortion mentality from its ranks. In the meantime, on March 21, Bart Stupak did himself absolutely no favors by going against his own amendment and voting for the pro-abortion Senate bill.

I suppose we could continue to pile on this man, but I think he's had enough. Stupak is "retiring" (that is, quitting with some trace of dignity) in the same way that LBJ did in the spring of 1968, as a beaten, lame duck politician whose ethical principles vanished we he began to doubt them. Peer pressure is an incredible thing, and is only increased when those in real positions of power begin to lean in on you. We will likely never know what those in power (such as President Obama and Speaker Pelosi) said to Rep. Stupak in the days leading up to the passage of the healthcare package. We will probably never know if hard-line threats to dissolve his political career were made or if bended-knee pleas to save the party and the president were given.

I think that we can be confident of the following: by March of this year Bart Stupak was either going to sacrifice his political career for the principle of the right to life for all or he was going to sacrifice his political career for the life of Barack Obama's fading popularity. He exercised his right to choose and went with the latter. And now his overall quiet, principled political career is a flatline.