In her thought-provoking discussion of the caucus results, Peggy Noonan recounts a line Mike Huckabee delivered when Jay Leno asked him why he was doing so well against Mitt Romney:

“People are looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them more of the guy they work with rather than the guy that laid them off.”

Whatever you think of the guy, that is a very funny and dead-on satirical quip. If Leno is looking for some scab writers, Huckabee just might fit the bill.

Some people don’t like Huckabee because of their aversion to and fear of “the Christian right.” Others don’t like him because he is not a “true conservative,” being too populist. If taken together, those seem to be contradictory concerns. If Huckabee is the new standard bearer for that movement, has the Christian right morphed into a Christian middle?

Perhaps the biggest problem with Huckabee for conservatives is that he would be the Republican version of George McGovern, pleasing an important element of the party’s base but destined to lose in such a spectacular way in the general election that he would knock that base out of influence for years.

What do you think?

Mike Huckabee is a Southern Baptist minister running, currently with some success, for the presidency. This raises an interesting issue of vocation. I’d like your help in sorting it out.

During the time of the Reformation, the archbishops, in addition to their ecclesiastical functions, were given large fiefdoms, which they ruled like any other prince. The pope claimed temporal authority not only over Rome but over all earthly rulers. He had an army that often warred against the emperor. The Reformers steadfastly rejected all of this, insisting that the church was to attend to the spiritual kingdom of God and let those with the Roman 13 vocation of earthly ruler attend to the earthly kingdom.

Not that a Huckabee candidacy would necessarily fall into this pattern. It isn’t the Southern Baptist church that would be claiming temporal authority, nor would the pastor of a congregation be ruling. Is it even correct to call Huckabee a pastor? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that he USED TO BE a pastor?

This hinges, of course, on whether it is ordination or the call that makes a pastor. (Or, as I would say, both.) In my journalism days I found that former presidential candidate the Rev. Al Sharpton has NEVER served a congregation. Is he really “a reverend”? I also knew of someone who went to seminary, served a congregation for a while, then resigned his call and later got a job with the FBI. Is that FBI agent still a pastor? Is his exercise of the temporal sword illegitimate?

This gets us into that thorny issue of church and ministry that ties us up in knots, but Huckabee provides an interesting test case. (Not that he would be the first pastor in the presidency. I believe that honor would fall to James Garfield.) Keep in mind that Baptist ordination is not the same as that in other churches and may not even be recognizable. (A friend of mine in high school got ordained in his baptist church just because he showed promise, before any kind of seminary training or call to a church. A high school kid! He did take a congregation later for awhile, but then he left that office for teaching, then to work in an office.)

But what do you think about this? Help me out here in untangling how the doctrine of vocation applies to a possible Huckabee presidency.

Andrew Sullivan sees Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama, the two victors in Iowa, as manifesting the same theme:

Look at their names: Huckabee and Obama. Both came from nowhere - from Arkansas and Hawaii. Both campaigned as human beings, not programmed campaign robots with messages honed in focus groups. Both faced powerful and monied establishments in both parties. And both are running two variants on the same message: change, uniting America again, saying goodbye to the bitterness of the polarized past, representing ordinary voters against the professionals. Neither has been ground down by long experience, but neither is a neophyte.

You have a Republican educated in a Bible college; and a Democrat who is the most credible African-American candidate for the presidency in history. Their respective margins were far larger than most expected. And the hope they have unleashed is palpable.
That hope is not just about their parties. It is about America. America’s ability to move forward, to unite, to get past the bitter red-and-blue past. That’s what the next generation wants. And they now seem motivated enough to get it.

It was certainly good to get back to our own church after weeks of holiday travel, and we came back to an excellent Epiphany sermon.

The Wise Men, we were told, did not get very far using earthly wisdom: They came to Jerusalem, logically enough but wrong, looking for the new King. Worse, they naively asked the old king for information about the new king who would replace him. It was when they started to follow God’s Word (the prophecy in Micah about the Messiah coming from Bethlehem) that they made progress. [My aside: Notice how the Bible helped them interpret the star, not the other way around. We get so caught up with trying to interpret the Bible that we neglect that the Bible is what interprets us!]

When the Wise Men found the Christ child, who was against all appearances of what worldly wisdom would say a king should be, they worshipped him. As Pastor Douthwaite put it, “they returned wiser than they came.”

Read the sermon for yourself here.