Last Sunday in Queens, New York, at the Allen A.M.E. Church, Vice President Albert Gore found himself endorsed for the Presidency by The Rev. Floyd Flake, pastor of the church, and a former Democratic Congressman. Calling Gore to the chancel, Flake said, "I don't do endorsements from across the pulpit because I never know who's out there watching the types of laws that govern separation of church and state, but I will say to you this morning, and you read it well: This should be the next President of the United States." That announcement took place at 11:15 a.m. last Sunday, after Gore had attended the 8:30 service at the Calvary Baptist Church and as the Associated Press reports, "at both churches Gore quoted scripture and hymns and recited in staid staccato cadence all the top Clinton-Gore administration appointments that went to blacks." He did this, according to the reporter, because the week before he found himself shaken by reports of support by both Flake and The Rev. Al Sharpton for Bill Bradley, Bradley's outreach to minority voters and their criticism of Gore.

Or again, Hillary Clinton found herself on the defensive last week when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani accused her of being hostile to America's religious traditions and of being among the warriors in what Giuliani calls a "relentless 30 year war the left-wing elite has waged against America's religious heritage." All of this left Mrs. Clinton breathless, and compelled her to describe her strong Methodist heritage while blistering Giuliani for unfairly using religion to undermine her candidacy.

And yes, last week George Bush faced a teenager in South Carolina who asked whether he believed God had called him to lead the country. He replied he really did not know whether it is God's will or not, but assured her, as he said, "I do believe in prayer and I do believe in a personal walk, and that's exactly what I'm going to do." As the reporter observed, "the fervent campaign for the religious right is as likely to veer into predestination as into tax cuts."

And according to The Globe this morning, in yesterday's Primary in South Carolina, self described "religious conservatives" voted for George Bush 3 to 1 over John McCain, driving McCain's political director to offer what the report describes as "an acid assessment saying, 'Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and Bob Jones (leaders of the so- called Christian Coalition) they ought to be congratulated' for turning out the Christian Conservative, antiabortion vote for Bush." And, giving the Democrats equal time, again, according to the Associated Press, Al Gore and Mrs. Clinton find themselves, at this very hour, in Albany, speaking at a church service highlighting the New York Legislature's Black and Hispanic Caucus-surely, while in church at least, another kind of "Christian Coalition" with an agenda, and candidates differing from the one in South Carolina.

Now friends, this matter of religion and politics, church and state, God's law and human law confront us all the time. They create incredible controversy: righteous crusades from one point of view or moral cowardice from another. The controversy splinters churches, divides communities, sets friend against friend, splays political parties. Over the centuries it put people in jail, sent others to the stake, drove thousands into exile, turned nations upside down. How shall we deal with this matter? How do religion and politics shape our loyalties? How do we decide? Who knows? Maybe as Eugene McCarthy, quoted by Kenneth Woodward in a recent Newsweek, indicates, we fall into countenancing the only two kinds of religion tolerated in Washington: vague beliefs strongly affirmed, or strong beliefs vaguely expressed.

I

In any case, as church people we should be clear, first of all, Jesus gives us very little help. The passage we read a few moments ago closes on a brilliantly ambiguous note. Our Lord's adversaries, eager to get him out of the way, intend to smoke out his basic loyalty and destroy him. "Is it lawful," they ask, "to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?"

Now, here is Jesus, an orthodox Jew, living in a Roman colony. Those who ask him the question represent two factions of Israel's religious and political life: one faction, the Saducees, collaborate with Rome. The other faction, the Pharisees, remain loyal to Israel's religious traditions. Each faction distrusts the other. Both of them hate Jesus, so they ally themselves against him, believing that the enemy of my enemy must be my friend. However Jesus answers, he is doomed. If Jesus answers their question, "No problem; pay the taxes you owe the emperor," the religious loyalists will condemn him as a prophetic fraud, a sell-out to gentile blasphemers, co-opted now by pagans, and as such, no longer a threat to the religious establishment. If Jesus says, "Forget it! No way we pay any taxes or tribute to the Emperor," then the Roman collaborators can count him a traitor and condemn him to death. Either way, you see, his mission and credibility, if not his life, go down the drain.

So what does Jesus do? He calls for a coin of the realm. "Whose image is this?" he asks, knowing perfectly well it belongs to Tiberius Caesar. And Jesus receives a prompt reply, "It's the Emperor's Image." Jesus answers curtly, "Render unto the emperor the things that are the Emperor's, and to God the things that are God's."

What kind of answer is that? What game is Jesus playing here? Frankly, Jesus plays an ingenious game. He buffaloes his adversaries. They shrink from the encounter. And yes, they should. Jesus blows their trap wide open. He trumps the malice of both sides. He offers an answer indicating no obvious preference between the Emperor and God. He shoves the issue back into their laps.

You see, friends, in this matter of what belongs to whom, Jesus leaves the choices to you and me; what we owe the state, how our religious loyalties, preferences and priorities accommodate and conflict with the loyalties, preferences and priorities of the realm, is for us to decide. Any number of elements figure into our decisions: our ideals, our self-interest, our family obligations, our jobs, our willingness to go to jail, indeed, the benign sentence of a former Sunday School teacher, the throwaway allusion of a long ago preacher, or one of those vague beliefs we would like to strongly affirm may nudge us this way or that. But Jesus makes clear it is up to us-not to the likes of Floyd Flake or Al Sharpton, or Bob Jones IV or Bernard Law or Pat Robertson or Jesse Jackson or an isolated proof text from the Bible or the political stance of the United Church of Christ or its President John Thomas or, God help us, the minister of the Old South Church in Boston. No one or no thing else can make the decision for us. They may offer components of the constellation making up our decision, but finally the New Testament says to you and says to me, to this church and to all of us seeking guidelines for true discipleship in this matter of religion and politics, "It's up to you to decide the implications of your loyalty to the state and to God, and you may be assured that however you make your decision, others will just as firmly make theirs, and that disagreement, maybe even a shouting match or two may be inevitable. The nation: its order. . . its survival . . . God. You decide.

II

Now friends, allowing for a shouting match or two, I want to touch a major danger surrounding this issue of religion and politics, a danger, it seems to me, our faith can guard against. It is this: those of us who take our religious conviction seriously need be wary of moralism, strident self-righteousness, the religious crusade. As one wise observer remarked, "There's nothing more frightening than a Calvinist riding toward you, sword unsheathed convinced he is doing the will of God." And let's face it, those of us in Congregational Churches can be vulnerable to these Calvinist crusades. Here we are, after all, ourselves in the Third Church in Boston, not far from the banks of the Charles. The king who gave his name to the river in whose mud the piles under this church are sunk, literally lost his head to some Congregationalists convinced they held a corner on the will of God. Remember? Oliver Cromwell, "God's Englishman," and the poet, John Milton, whose epics we cherish, whose blindness we can barely fathom, yet who authored virulent and deadly propaganda-a master, if you will, of attack ads-viciously labeling Roman Catholics blasphemers and his Roman Catholic king a tyrant-John Milton, whose poetry our college English professors loved, a fierce proponent of regicide, there: the two of them, Cromwell and Milton clamoring to impose the Commonwealth of God on England, and their emigrating brothers and sisters here in New England-right here in Boston-no less convinced their errand into the wilderness could in this new world achieve a Divine Commonwealth.

The results: autocratic, cruel, bloody. In Britain budding elections disappeared, magnificent cathedrals were pillaged and burned; the scaffold, the block and the fiery stake became primary instruments of God's political and religious will. And in this country, in this Commonwealth as Cromwell would have it, a religious and political intolerance rooted in theocracy became the order of the day-a history we still regret, and are loath to claim.

So, what can save us from this danger? What can mitigate this risk of self righteousness? What aspect of our faith protects us from the dark side of the moral crusade? Well, the Christian faith, it seems to me, calls us not only to pursue a semblance of the dominion of God here on earth, it reminds us as well of our sin. Our faith holds before us our tendency to deceive ourselves as to the righteousness of our judgments, the purity of our ideals, the beneficence of our objectives. Our Christian faith enables us to pursue what, in secular terms we call tolerance, in personal ethical terms, humility and yes, magnanimity.

Where might we look for such virtue? In whom do religion and politics join in a most dynamic and coherent fashion? Well, on this Presidents' Day in the year 2000 we might remember one gifted politician whose sense of the brokenness of human life and whose humility and magnanimity amid what appears a moral victory continues to create awe in us all. Who is our model? Abraham Lincoln.

In a treasure of an article on Abraham Lincoln's religion, Reinhold Niebuhr writes, "Alone among statesmen of the ancient and modern periods, Lincoln had a sense of historical meaning so high as to cast doubt on the intentions of both sides, to put the enemy in the same category of ambiguity as the nation to which his own life was committed." Niebuhr tell us here that Lincoln can view moral conflict- in this case the Civil War-from a transcendent perspective enabling him to see and to grasp the moral, political and military objectives of both sides, to understand the flaws in all of those objectives, his own included, yet stand firm, sensitive to his own limitation, refusing to demean his adversary.

Let me illustrate. I want to offer just a few lines from his Second Inaugural Address, surely among the greatest of America's state papers. In that address Lincoln puts the civil war into a dramatically moral arena.

"Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude or duration it has attained. Neither anticipated the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other."

A profoundly moral perspective on a human event! But immediately following this passage, Lincoln exhibits a moral humility rare for anyone so deeply engaged in reflection amid chaotic events. In this next sentence Lincoln articulates the moral and political judgments we must make amid the intense give and take of history. He never hesitates to make clear a moral point of view, a deliberate stance, but he seldom fails to offer reservations about those moral commitments, reservations born of a deep sense of human limitation, history's unfinished condition, our own brokenness, bias and self interest. Here is the moral judgment, a judgment he stood for throughout his mature life:

"It may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of others men's faces."

That is a moral judgment about the heinous nature of slavery. But Lincoln then offers the moral reservation:

"But let us not judge that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered-that of neither has been answered fully."

Do you see what this master politician does here? He disengages what he believes to be the ultimate purposes of God-the extinction of slavery, the emancipation of slaves, the assertion of the Declaration of Independence that all of us are created equal-he disengages that moral conviction from what he suspects to be his own partial and self interested moral judgments. He realizes both North and South had a stake in slavery, protected it, tolerated it, sustained it, made money off it; he understands that war corrodes the innocence of all. As Niebuhr writes,

"It was Lincoln's achievement to embrace a paradox which lies at the center of the spirituality of all western culture: namely the affirmation of a meaningful history and a religious reservation about the partiality and bias which the human actors and agents betray in their definition of meaning."

"It is an important achievement to embrace this paradox. For the evil byproduct of the historical dynamism of western culture is the fanaticism confusing partial meanings and contingent purposes with the ultimate meaning of life itself. This lack of fanaticism and this spirit of magnanimity in Lincoln are revealed through many of his policies, but most of all in his spirit toward the defeated secessionists-again eloquently expressed in his second Inaugural: 'With malice toward none; with charity for all . . . let us strive to finish the work we are in . . .' Unfortunately, [writes Niebuhr], his untimely death at the hands of an assassin prevented him from carrying out his design of pacification and launched the nation into a terrible period of vindictive crushing of a vanquished foe, from which we have not yet recovered. . ."

(Could it be, I wonder, that this brouhaha over the raising of the Confederate Flag on the Dome of the Capital in Columbia, South Carolina, arises partly as a consequence of vengeance, vindictiveness, corruption meted out by malicious, uncharitable northern victors? That in no ways justifies it; but maybe, just a little, it explains a small piece of it.) Where might we be today if humility, charity, magnanimity prevailed?

So friends, we view the fierce Divine claims of our primary candidates through the lens of one of the principals of Presidents' Day. What with Al Gore gaining the imprimatur of The Reverends Floyd Flake and Al Sharpton and joining them enthusiastically in prayer and praise, George W. Bush receiving the enthusiastic embrace of Bob Jones IV, whose university, in Christ's name considers interracial dating taboo and Catholicism a sectarian cult, what with Gary Bauer and his pledge to put the 10 Commandments in all the nation's classrooms abandoning his campaign and sidling up to John McCain, with Bill Bradley confessing religious faith has an impact on all of life, including one's life as a politician, and Alan Keyes lobbying for prayer in the public schools, we have a stable of primary candidates and their partisans making noises about God and the Emperor. All of us are in one way or another in a similar situation. And for you, as well as for me during these next months, I pray, as we decide what belongs to God and what belongs to the Emperor, we may do so with two great gifts of God, evident uniquely in that sixteenth of our Presidents: humility and yes, magnanimity.