Father Anthony speaks to President Obama: Ancient Churches & the President of the U.S

[Gxg (G²)]

Came across this from one of my friends from the Coptic Orthodox Church I've visited a number of times on Fr. Anthony Messeh meeting the President at the 2015 Presidental President. Fr. Messeh has always been an encouragement to me and I was not aware he met with the president recently or went to those kinds of events. As she said best:

I barely ever agree with President Obamas decisions, but I do think it's so awesome that he invited Father Anthony to speak at the White House. What a blessing and honor. May God continue to do great works through Father Anthony. You are a blessing to the orthodox community! So inspiring & motivating!

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I like what Fr.Messeh said once before when it came to the issue of leaders needing to be kept up with....and as he noted before:

I want a President who understands his role and the role of government in our lives. Again, I don’t know much about politics, but I know the Bible. The Bible speaks about the role of government on several occasions, and every time it is clear that the government is to a nation as a father is to a household.

• As a father PROTECTS his children from evil, so too should the President protect his country from those who seek to harm us.

• As a father REWARDS his children who work hard and abide by the rules of the house, so too should the President set up a system that rewards hard-working and law-abiding citizens while deterring those who seek to get around the system in one way or another.

• As a father CARES for each of his children – especially the weak and needy child – so too should the President care for those who can’t care for themselves.

• As a father SEEKS TO BRING OUT THE BEST in his children, so too should the President seek to equip and enable us to be successful (don’t give us fish, teach us how to fish).

• As a father seeks to MAKE PEACE AND FOSTER LOVE between all the members of his household, so too should the President seek to unite this country and bring us all together around our common goals and interests.

Who am I going to vote for? Nice try. I’ve lived in Washington DC my whole life – so I’m not dumb enough to fall for that. This isn’t about that.

This is about explaining to you how I see things and how I plan to make my decision. Don’t just look at issues in the short term; it’s short term thinking that gets us into more trouble (ie, we want a quick fix right now). Don’t be fooled into that kind of thinking. Neither candidate has a magic button that can solve all of today’s problems instantly.

Instead think in terms of each candidate’s way of thinking – their view on their role and the role of government for our country.

I’ll repeat what I said earlier: “I don’t want a leader who just has a good plan for right now; I want a leader who thinks according to sound Biblical principles and will make decisions accordingly for however long he’s in office.”​

That was shared back during the Presidential Debates of 2012 - and on the issue, something I appreciate about Fr.Anthony is that he was willing to speak to the issues that it seems many believers are not willing to tackle if in an Apostolic Church setting - and I am curious as to whether or not you feel that believers in Traditional Churches need to be in any way involved in the political scene.....and why they either should or shouldn't.

As I've shared elsewhere before, I can't say that being in Ancient Christianity has convinced me that the Church should NOT be speaking to political issues since many of the benefits we have today came as a direct result of addressing political issues. A brief example of this would be seen with others like MLK and others fighting for equal rights[/URL]....with others in Orthodoxy such as Archbishop Iakovos of America marching with Dr. King and his working with other Southern Baptists for a reason that many did not like).

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I am wondering why this does not seem to be a prevelant today. Fr. Anthony has worked with others outside of Traditional Church circles - just as others did with MLK - and it has made a lot of difference for people. But it does seem that there is a lot of resistance for others working as believers in the political realm and thinking that one's faith is somehow compromised because of them being involved. Does anyone disagree or agree?

 

[Shane R]

The parish where I was chrismated was only about three hours from Washington D.C. I think the proximity to the capital made that parish more militant than most in expressing themselves politically. Since the beginning of Arab Spring, they have conducted a demonstration at least yearly. However, the demonstration is always about protection for the Copts. I have mixed feelings about it because I feel like the USA is set up to allow people to whine all they want about issues, but the republic system takes any real authority out of the hands of the people. I don't see much point in demonstrating without effect.

 

[Gxg (G²)]

The parish where I was chrismated was only about three hours from Washington D.C. I think the proximity to the capital made that parish more militant than most in expressing themselves politically. Since the beginning of Arab Spring, they have conducted a demonstration at least yearly. However, the demonstration is always about protection for the Copts. I have mixed feelings about it because I feel like the USA is set up to allow people to whine all they want about issues, but the republic system takes any real authority out of the hands of the people. I don't see much point in demonstrating without effect.

The proximity would definitely make things more easy with protest when seeing the history of D.C.....although I do wonder if the U.S. only allows for others to verbally protest without change or if there's a limit that Churches have.

 

[Gxg (G²)]

The parish where I was chrismated was only about three hours from Washington D.C. I think the proximity to the capital made that parish more militant than most in expressing themselves politically. Since the beginning of Arab Spring, they have conducted a demonstration at least yearly. However, the demonstration is always about protection for the Copts. I have mixed feelings about it because I feel like the USA is set up to allow people to whine all they want about issues, but the republic system takes any real authority out of the hands of the people. I don't see much point in demonstrating without effect.

In light of what you noted, I do wonder how the Coptic or any of the Orthodox Churches are going to respond in light of events like same-sex marriage legalized

 

[Gxg (G²)]

In light of what you noted, I do wonder how the Coptic or any of the Orthodox Churches are going to respond in light of events like same-sex marriage legalized

• The Church Fathers and a Christian's Response | Comment
  
  
• Who Would the Early Church Fathers Vote For? | kellypigott
  

 

[Shane R]

I saw an interesting link on NewAdvent several days ago, shortly after the SCOTUS ruling, that basically said Pope Francis is not the only pope embattled in the culture wars. It linked to a brief story about Pope Tawadros II and his unwavering stance on canon law in regards to divorce. It characterized him as unpopular with the Copts in Egypt. I have not had the opportunity to worship at a Coptic parish since about a year after his consecration so I don't have a sense of his popularity among the Copts of the diaspora.

 

[Gxg (G²)]

I saw an interesting link on NewAdvent several days ago, shortly after the SCOTUS ruling, that basically said Pope Francis is not the only pope embattled in the culture wars. It linked to a brief story about Pope Tawadros II and his unwavering stance on canon law in regards to divorce. It characterized him as unpopular with the Copts in Egypt. I have not had the opportunity to worship at a Coptic parish since about a year after his consecration so I don't have a sense of his popularity among the Copts of the diaspora.

I remember coming across that aspect of information some time ago when it came to noting how divorce was a huge issue in Egypt (which is something C.S Lewis whom many in Orthodoxy love focused on during his day since that was their equivalent of what we see today on the debate of gay marriage).

• Francis is not the only pope facing a divorce dilemma | Crux
  
  
• Pope Francis I and Egypt's Tawadros II: A tale of two popes ..

That Pope Tawadros II was very outspoken on the issue is something to remember, although I will have to ask the Copts next time I am able to make it to service..

 

[Gxg (G²)]

. I have mixed feelings about it because I feel like the USA is set up to allow people to whine all they want about issues, but the republic system takes any real authority out of the hands of the people. I don't see much point in demonstrating without effect.

Interesting to consider what one Orthodox individual noted on the matter, as seen here in Clergy and politics, always a hot topic | OrthoCuban for excerpt:

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  When I comment on current affairs, even if I am careful not to mention any political party or affiliation, I am more and more often challenged with the statement that I am engaging in politics. I have noted that other clergy and, yes, even our own OCN (Orthodox Christian Network) are beginning to encounter that challenge more and more. Inevitably, because bishops, priests, and deacons preach, teach, and talk about reaching out to those less fortunate or speak about life issues or actively engage in social ministry of some type or even lead some marches (such as Metropolitan Jonah who is strongly involved in pro-life activities), this type of challenge is becoming a regular part of our lives. “Father, you are engaging in politics and you should not do so. You should just preach the Gospel.”
  
  To add spice to this discussion, you should know that at least one of our Orthodox jurisdictions in America has specifically instructed its priests to not engage in politics. I suspect that I know what they meant, but, given the current climate in the USA, I can see how that restriction could be misinterpreted and misused. You see, the accusation of a religious person being involved inappropriately in politics is a very old and dangerous one. Let me take you back through some events documented in the Holy Scriptures and let you see for yourself.
  
  The foremost event was the trial of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Look back at the Scripture. In the Gospels, it is recorded that Pontius Pilate did not agree to the crucifixion of Our Lord until it was pointed out to him that the Sanhedrin would report Pilate to Caesar for not executing a person who claimed to be a king. “We have no king but Caesar” was the cry that sent Our Lord to his doom. His cousin, John the Forerunner, was executed for an act that had political overtones, the condemnation of a ruler for violating Jewish law by marrying his brother’s wife. This happened in the Old Testament as well.
  
  The Prophet Jeremiah was accused of treason. Let me give you a long quote from the Book of Jeremiah:
  
  “This is what the Lord says: Do not deceive yourselves, thinking, ‘The Babylonians will surely leave us.’ They will not! Even if you were to defeat the entire Babylonian army that is attacking you and only wounded men were left in their tents, they would come out and burn this city down.”
  
  After the Babylonian army had withdrawn from Jerusalem because of Pharaoh’s army, Jeremiah started to leave the city to go to the territory of Benjamin to get his share of the property among the people there. But when he reached the Benjamin Gate, the captain of the guard, whose name was Irijah son of Shelemiah, the son of Hananiah, arrested him and said, “You are deserting to the Babylonians!”
  
  “That’s not true!” Jeremiah said. “I am not deserting to the Babylonians.” But Irijah would not listen to him; instead, he arrested Jeremiah and brought him to the officials. They were angry with Jeremiah and had him beaten and imprisoned in the house of Jonathan the secretary, which they had made into a prison.
  
  Jeremiah was put into a vaulted cell in a dungeon, where he remained a long time.
  
  The accusation of engaging in politics and/or the accusation of treason has a long history. It is one of Satan’s dearest tricks. Accuse a prophet or a pastor or a priest or a bishop or Our Lord Jesus Christ of politics/treason and you can silence him. That silence accomplishes Satan’s purpose because it prevents God’s voice from being spoken into a situation.
  
  On 26 March 1965, Time magazine published a photograph of Archbishop Iakovos of blessed memory marching on the Selma march along with Martin Luther King and to his immediate right. He was at that time primate of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. By his action, he put the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese firmly on the side of changing the existing “Jim Crow” laws as being a violation of Christian belief. Needless to say, he, too, was accused of engaging in politics rather than simply speaking God’s truth into a practical and, yes, political situation. Nowadays he is simply seen as a hierarch who walked in the steps of the saints.
  
  Other Orthodox hierarchs, priests, deacons, and lay people have engaged in actions which have political import. And they were right to do so. Yet many of them faced, and continue to face, the accusation of engaging inappropriately in politics. It is a charge that was successful in imprisoning Jeremiah, murdering John the Forerunner, and sending Our Lord to an unjust death. And it is a charge that continues to be successfully used to this day.
  
  You only need to read today’s Christian magazines, journals, and blogs to see how often the charge of engaging in politics is used to try to silence or disrespect the views of a hierarch, priest, or deacon (or of a non-Orthodox Christian who is trying to say that something is wrong). But, unless such a person is advocating a particular candidate, or even perhaps a particular party to the exclusion of all other parties, then it is unlikely that the person is engaging in politics. That is what I believe that the jurisdiction that forbids politics to its clergy is trying to say. And they are correct when they say that. I fully support that jurisdiction in forbidding their clergy to engage in politics.
  
  But, let us be careful lest we try to stretch what that jurisdiction has said to mean that clergy may not say anything that is offensive politically to some Orthodox Christian. Hierarchs, priests, deacons, subdeacons, readers, etc., are not called to make all feel better. We are called to be God’s voice to his Creation. Does that mean that we are always correct? No, it does not! Some weeks, I would settle for feeling like I am 50% correct. But, it does mean that we attempt to speak faithfully, knowing that we may be accused of wrongful behavior in order to neutralize our words.
  

 

[Gxg (G²)]

The parish where I was chrismated was only about three hours from Washington D.C. I think the proximity to the capital made that parish more militant than most in expressing themselves politically. Since the beginning of Arab Spring, they have conducted a demonstration at least yearly. However, the demonstration is always about protection for the Copts. I have mixed feelings about it because I feel like the USA is set up to allow people to whine all they want about issues, but the republic system takes any real authority out of the hands of the people. I don't see much point in demonstrating without effect.

Had this on my mind as I just got the book on the man (St. Basil the Great) after being inspired with how Orthodoxy has a very rich history in speaking on issues concerning social justice and addressing issues around us.

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• Episode 36 St. Basil - Ancient Faith Radio
• Building The New City: St. Basil’s Social Vision « In Communion.
• THE SOCIAL DOCTRINE OF ST. BASIL THE GREAT
  
  
• THE CHURCH AS NEIGHBOR: CORPORATELY AND COMPASSIONATELY ENGAGED BY FR. JOHN D. JONES

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Came across this excellent article that I really thought summed up a lot on where Orthodox have stood on the issue of politics in history. As said there (for excerpt):

-"We have a striking witness of a corporate, compassionate attunement to the world in our own monastic tradition. In the Byzantine period of the Church, as Giles Constable notes, almost all houses [monastic communities] distributed alms to the poor and to travelers at the gate and provided food and lodging in the guesthouse, and many of them assisted orphans, prisoners, and women who lacked the wherewithal for dowries. The hospital associated with the Pantokrator in Constantinople was unique, but many houses supported hospices, old age homes, and hospitals, and also bridges, which were considered a worthy object of charity. Finally, I want to note that compassion should make us critically attuned to the kinds of injustice that marginalize, dehumanize, and exclude people from a legitimate participation in their social world. Samaritans were outcasts to Jews, and vice versa. Yet the Good Samaritan’s compassionate action implicitly challenged the legitimacy of various negative barriers—psychological and social—by which Jews and Samaritans ostracized each other. If compassion is so often most manifest when directed to those who are marginalized in a society, it is because compassion is fundamentally without borders. As such, compassionate action is attuned to the contrived borders which exclude people from a full participation in their social world. Compassion in principle shatters the artificial and unjust ways in which humans individually and collectively marginalize and dehumanize people. For example, St. Herman of Alaska and other monks of the American Mission sought to defend the Alaskan natives against oppression and exploitation by the Russian American Company headed by Alexander Baranov.

Their compassion incurred a particular cross: “for their concern and intervention, the members of the Mission were persecuted, among them Father Herman.” Jesus feeds the 5000In a similar way, a compassionate response to assisting those who are poor is in principle critically sensitive to attitudes and policies that seek to blame the poor entirely for their poverty. One need only read St. John Chrysostom’s many homilies dealing with poverty to see how often he caustically rejects claims by parishioners that the poor did not deserve assistance since they were to blame for their condition. Indeed, St. John pointedly rejects any appeal to Jesus’s remark that “the poor are always with you” to justify spending money on beautifying the Church at the expense of directing funds to support the poor and others in need. For what is the profit, when His table indeed is full of golden cups, but He perishes with hunger? First fill Him, as one who is hungry, and then abundantly deck out His table also. Do you make Him a cup of gold, while you do not even give Him a cup of cold water? And what is the profit? Do you furnish His table with cloths bespangled with gold, while to Him you do not afford even the necessary covering? iconsTo be sure, St. John is addressing parishioners who would rather have donated money to the Church than to those who were poor. But is there any reason why a parish community should not consider this text to be relevant when it considers how to use its own time, talents, and resources? If it did, it certainly could not automatically justify simply turning entirely towards its own internal “needs” rather than cultivating a communal commitment to facing the world in a compassionate manner. Such a community would not use a text like “the poor shall always be with you” to justify some inevitability or divine sanction to poverty, among other things, as a reason for avoiding compassionate engagement with the world. St. John Chrysostom certainly did not think that poverty in his day was inevitable. He thought it could be eliminated, at least in extreme form, if people were sufficiently willing to share economic resources with one another. Indeed, while St. Cyril of Alexandria acknowledges that in this text, Jesus gives a certain precedence to honoring him over serving the poor or doing works of mercy in general, he denies that this precedent is absolute. In fact he writes that Our Lord himself tells us “it is not necessary always without intermission to devote our time to honoring Him, or to spend everything upon the priestly service, but rather [we should] lay out the greatest part upon the poor.”St. Cyril notes that while, at the command of Christ, the apostles devoted themselves to prayer and fasting between his Ascension and Pentecost, they afterwards “eagerly spent all the offerings that were brought to them upon the poor.” They did this as leaders of and on behalf of the Church. Indeed, generosity in service to others pervades the history of the Church in its corporate works of mercy. As Fr. Demetrios Constantelos notes in his discussion of history of corporate philanthropic activity of the Orthodox Church: The Church, in the Byzantine era, including its monastic communities, often provided the essentials of social security for a large segment of the population of the Empire throughout its existence…it took under its aegis orphans, widows, the old and the disabled, the stranger and the unemployed; it saw to the release of prisoners of war and of those unjustly detained. Moreover, Orthodox Christian communities that endeavor to face the world around them in a neighborly, compassionate manner should not shun, but in fact should cultivate, the critical dimension of compassion. There is absolutely no reason why a Christian compassionate attunement to the world should be blind to social and structural factors that harm people. In 2009, for example, the Diocese of Alaska (Orthodox Church in America) “passed a unanimous resolution opposing any development that may be harmful to the people or land of Southwest Alaska.”

The resolution was passed in opposition to the development of the Pebble Mine in Alaska. In 1989 at its Ninth All American Council, the Orthodox Church in America passed a motion supporting “the abolition of the death penalty in this and all countries” and further recommended that “legislative provisions be made for life imprisonment without possibility of parole for those subject to the death penalty.” Examples like these certainly suggest that there is good reason in principle for Orthodox communities to address as appropriate the institutional and social factors that promote or block the compassionate treatment of people in their local communities. Fr. Constantelos’ observation, thus, is well worth remembering by Orthodox Christians individually and as communities: Because of peculiar historical experiences––one might speak of vicissitudes––the Orthodox have often failed to respond to social problems such as racism, peace and war, social justice, and political oppression in a systematic manner…[However] if some Orthodox fail to raise voices of protest against racism, injustice, and oppression, they betray the ethos of their Church. But when they concern themselves with contemporary social problems, they act in full agreement with the nature and character of their Church in history. IC" ​