When I was a pastor in South Georgia, our congregation had a member by the name of Senator Jimmy Hodge Timmons. He went by “Hodge” around the church, and he was our state senator  in the legislature and I think during his time he worked hard to be a friend of the community an effective representative.

One year while I was there, Hodge came to me and invited me to be the Chaplain of the day for the Georgia Senate. This was an honorary event when you would come and offer a devotional and prayer for the elected representatives. It’s one of those squishy things in Church and State that our founders left intentionally ambiguous so that we would have to work out how reason, freedom, faith, and humanity would figure out how to influence our common struggle to have a democratic republic through a common civic humility that embodied mutual respect without coercion.

At any rate, I invited my Minister of Music to ride up with me and we left before dawn for the long trip. On the way, we stopped just outside Atlanta to get some gas, but as we got ready to leave, my car wouldn’t start. We frantically asked the station mechanic to check and he said we’d need a new battery. We had allowed some time, but not much.

We pushed the car into his garage and he went to work. Unfortunately, my car had the battery located in a quite difficult spot and he was laboring greatly to reach one of the terminals. We stood over to the side while he swore and cursed the company that made my car, and particularly the engineers who designed it. He was oblivious to the two ministers in coat and tie standing nearby. “I don’t know what these bleeping bleepity bleep engineers were thinking when they put this bleepity bleep piece of bleep here. Bleepity bleep.” Religious words, bathroom words, the entire vocabulary, hurled at a tiny battery. At one point he remembered we were there, looked up at us, our ties, and ask, “You fellas ain’t engineers, are you?”

“No, sir,” I said, and he said, “Good,” and returned to his litany of condemnations. Finally, he got it free and looked up.

“So, what DO you y’all do fer a livin’?” “

Um, we’re Baptist ministers.”

He said, “Well, I won’t hold that against you.” Soon we were on our way.

Being chaplain of the day at that time, in the late 1980s, was a highly ceremonial event. The Lieutenant governor was Zell Miller, who was presiding. And he would later become the governor of Georgia. The Presiding senator introduced you, and you gave a short meditation, and then when you finished all of the. Senators would file by and shake your hand, thank you for what you had said, and Lieutenant Governor Miller was last. You got your picture made with the Lieutenant Governor and your Senator, Then you’d be allowed to go so they could get on about the haggling and arguing that is the session business.

As they were introducing themselves informally before I started, many came over, figuring who I was and calling me “Preacher,” or “Reverend.”  When they found out that I was Hodge Timmons’ pastor, they began to make all sorts of jokes. “We didn’t know he had a pastor. Boy, do we need to tell you about him,” that sort of good-natured ribbing.

When I got up to speak, I said, “I almost changed my topic after so many of you came and talked to me about my church member.  Maybe, I thought, I should talk about the parable of the Shepherd who left the fold to look for the one lost Sheep in Luke 15.” It got a nice laugh to start the day.

My devotion for that day was from Luke 8:43-48:

⁴³ And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years,^[a] but no one could heal her. ⁴⁴ She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped. ⁴⁵ “Who touched me?” Jesus asked. When they all denied it, Peter said, “Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you.” ⁴⁶ But Jesus said, “Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me.” ⁴⁷ Then the woman, seeing that she could not go unnoticed, came trembling and fell at his feet. In the presence of all the people, she told why she had touched him and how she had been instantly healed. ⁴⁸ Then he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.”

It is the basis of the verse in the bluegrass gospel tune, “I Am a Pilgrim” that goes, “If I could but touch the hem of his garment, I believe he could make me whole.” I was a pastor in a hard-bitten part of Georgia where the haves and have nots were struggling, and we were underfunded. 52% of adults over the age of 25 hadn’t graduated from high school. Social problems were deep and long.

I said to the senators, “You are here doing very important work, and there are many people who tell you how important it is and you hold power to do some things and not other things. You are overseeing problems for millions of people. But I hope while you do this work, You might have of some of that same sensitivity that Jesus had, to feel the twelve years of pain that one woman had suffered with all those years, the hurt, the sense of being cut off, left out. Despite all the crowds, He didn’t lose the capacity and sensitivity and ability to empathize with one person, reaching out in desperation. It’s easy to lose that when you are dealing with statistics and masses and power.

When I finished, they all came by, we made our pictures and we headed home. As we drove back, away from the vainglory I was feeling pretty good about myself. I had a nice color picture coming of me with the Lieutenant Governor. I’d had an entire group of senators in the state of Georgia come and tell me what a wonderful little talk I had given. And I said to my companion in the car, “That really went well, didn’t it?” He nodded. “I think they seemed to really listen and hear what I had to say, don’t you?” He nodded.

I was quiet for a long moment. “But they ARE politicians aren’t they?” “Yes,” he said.

I was quiet again. “I don’t really know what they actually thought about what I said, do I?” He said, “Nope.”

You know, religion is one way of looking at life and the world, and politics is another. Both can do great good, and both are capable of enormous evil. History is full of examples of both. How do they live together? That’s the great challenge. We live in the same place together, but in our faiths, our understandings, our consciences, experiences, and beliefs we are profoundly diverse.

In the nearly 250 years of this experiment, we have tried something new—Separation of Church and State, embodied in the First Amendment. Government and faith. They coexist in this beautiful idea of our Founders, hopefully each to flourish without ruining the other.

It is hard to argue that we are doing well right now. We are face to face with a dangerous mess at the moment. We have a pile of grievances with one another and a list of resentments a mile high.

This country was created, though, by some brilliant thinkers with clay feet and blind spots aplenty. But they had an extraordinary vision. They put it into a Constitution and a Bill of Rights, hoping we would resist all the most terrible temptations they clearly foresaw. They saw the possibility of freedom and religion dwelling together in peace, not in the terrible bad marriage that had wrecked Europe for so many centuries.

We live in a very different time from theirs. We are one big, virtual crowd, sitting mostly in our cocoons or glued to our screens. Our connections are even more removed, so that now there is a layer of disconnection between us and our neighbor that is in our heads before we even speak a word in the presence of another.

It might do well to re-touch our history, not our myths about it, but the words of founders and thinkers, real history, painful and true. And learn again something that inspired Jefferson and Adams and George Washington, Patrick Henry and Roger Williams and tore at the hearts of Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, endeavoring to hold true to the implications of what it would be like for everyone who lives here to live in a deeper sensitivity to the rights endowed by the Creator to each of us. A sensitivity we have failed multiple times. A sensitivity though, that keeps calling us back to first principles.

We won’t find it through politics alone. Or through religious politics either. Or religion that resigns from the angry crowd. We have to figure out how to keep walking into the crowd and still feel that deepest part of each other, that trembling hand reaching through the crowd, in need of healing. To find the best of what genuine faith and religion, wherever it comes from, brings not more rage and division, but something larger and extraordinary. And where politics, now reduced to the partisan bickering that George Washington told us would destroy us, has brought us to this fearful precipice. Hoping that we might reach out, somehow, to touch the hem of some garment of the mystery beyond all of us and find our way. Together.