This week the New York Times ran a story about a pastor in Wisconsin who was removed from his congregation—and eventually turned in his clergy credentials—after preaching a sermon endorsing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for president in 2028.[i]
The most telling detail in the story is that before this pastor ever spoke with his bishop or his congregation, he alerted the local press about what he planned to say. That’s not proclamation; that’s publicity. It reveals the sermon wasn’t crafted for the people in the pews but for the cameras.
Now, I don’t bring this up to pile on or to dissect IRS regulations. That’s not the point. If you’re interested in IRS regulations, I am sure there is an episode on CSPAN that you can find. What interests me is what was missing from that sermon. What interests me (concerns me) is what wasn’t proclaimed because the issue here isn’t just the IRS and its rules about churches endorsing candidates. It’s far deeper: what exactly is the task of the preacher?
My ordination vows tie me to Word and Sacrament. To proclaim Jesus Christ, crucified, buried, risen, and ascended. To bear witness not to the horse race of American politics but to the scandalous, life-giving foolishness of the gospel.
Will Willimon says in Preachers Dare that the urge to be a “prophetic preacher” usually collapses into little more than “political posturing and preening slightly to the left of the Democratic Party.”[ii] He’s right. And as a pastor just outside Washington, D.C., surrounded by people who shape policy for a living, I get the temptation. Drop a quick political aside in a sermon, and folks nod knowingly. It lands. It feels like a connection. To do this, all you need to do is watch a few episodes of The West Wing. But it’s the cheapest kind of connection. It is the kind that never dares to proclaim the gospel. Honestly, I’ve sat through enough sermons that turned into campaign rallies to know they’re about as compelling as a bad Rotary Club rubber chicken luncheon: plenty of applause lines, but precious little gospel.
A few years ago, the Festival of Homiletics came to Washington, D.C. I was thrilled. Mainly because I could sleep in my own bed instead of a hotel and avoid traveling far from home. But when the schedule came out, I realized the main headliners weren’t preachers at all. They were politicians. Corey Booker. Elizabeth Warren. Now, I don’t doubt their skill with a microphone. But when a preaching festival features politicians as the star attractions, it says something unsettling about the state of the pulpit. Have we really lost so much confidence in the gospel that we’ve outsourced proclamation to the very people already drowning us in political speeches? The church doesn’t need more senators who can sound like preachers. The church needs preachers who dare sound like witnesses, fools, even for the gospel.
To be fair, when the festival returned to D.C. in 2025, the headliners were actually preachers again, not professional politicians. That correction was worth celebrating—and it showed a renewed confidence that the church already has what it needs: not policy speeches dressed up as sermons, but the living Word preached in all its foolishness and grace.
The real danger here isn’t politics. It’s displacement.
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