Do politics belong in sermons?
Politics affect people, and as believers who have been commissioned to love our neighbors, I actually think we should not be afraid of talking about policies that affect others.
I don’t agree with this Pastor’s stance here. The loving thing to do is to speak up against injustices, not to keep quiet about them. I have a t-shirt that says “Justice is love out loud.” This guy isn’t doing or promoting that.
Candidly, there’s a lot he said that turned me off. For starters, I don’t like that he’s recovering from COVID and up there, “maskless” and yelling. I don’t like that he referred to California negatively as the Wild West. (It’s my understanding that the Governor of CA has been one of the more thoughtful ones and had put a lot of safety measures in place.) In addition to expressing anti-American sentiment, which I also heard him do when I attended Village Church in person, his derogatory comments towards Liberals (“200 genders”) were needless and insulting to a large demographic of people. Is that demonstrating love? Will that tactic win converts? I don’t think so.
Is his premise correct, that the primary job of a Pastor is to evangelize? Is that any of our jobs? What if we were just to demonstrate radical love towards our neighbors? Wouldn’t that accomplish much more?
I also think he, and the entire Christian nationalist movement are confused about the word freedom. The freedoms about which the trucker convoy and radical American Republicans speak is something very different from what Jesus offers. If he can’t denounce these illegal blockades and occupations, that is a real problem.