He was born in 1912 near Barry's Corner in the Irish middle class area of North Cambridge, Massachusetts. The third of three children his mother died when he was nine months old. He was raised by a French Canadian housekeeper until his father remarried when he was eight. Jumping into politics in 1928 he worked for the election of FDR. His first job was as a brick layer, but politics kept calling. In 1932 he suffered his only political defeat, as he ran for Cambridge City Council. It was after that loss that Tip O'Neal discovered, as he would say later, that all politics is local. O'Neal along with generations of other politicians have used that understanding to their advantage as they won reelection again and again because they were able to "bring home the bacon" to their constituents.
Leadership in a representative form of government is a delicate balancing act. On the one hand a representative is supposed to do the obvious, represent his or her constituents in the larger governing body. They are to insure that the needs of those who elected them are met. On the other hand representatives are also part of a larger body (city, state, or nation) whose interests they are also supposed to be considering. Thus, leadership becomes a balancing act. Unfortunately as most of us have witnessed, the tendency is to return to all politics being local wherein representatives focus solely on gaining advantage for and protecting the interests of those who elected them (in order to insure reelection) to the detriment of the needs of the larger community.
This understanding of all politics being local is nothing new and actually plays a role in the Road to Redemption which we have been examining. Last week we looked at the Return from Exile as an example of God's faithfulness not only to God's particular people Israel, but to the entire creation as God continued the process of redeeming all of creation. Once again however there came a hitch in the process. As the people of God began to reconstitute themselves as a people and a nation they were face with the ongoing dilemma which all communities face; do we focus on our own needs and survival or do we risk everything and fulfill our greater role as agents of the redemption of the world? The leadership of the people chose the former…that their job was about the local needs of the people and not the redemption of the world.
In the Old Testament books of Ezra and Nehemiah we read of the Jewish leaders separating the people of God from all outsiders. Even those Jews who had remained in Israel during the exile and married non-Jewish women were to divorce their wives in order that God's people somehow become a cultically and racially "pure" people. This separation was the beginning of the isolation of God's people from the rest of humanity. This separation almost insured that the larger vision of the redemptive purpose of God's people would be lost. The world would have to take care of itself because Judaism was going to take care of itself and its own survival. In essence all politics and all religion became centered on the survival of the community. All religion was local.
While it would be nice to believe that it was only the Jewish people who focused on the survival of the community rather than the redemption of the world we would be wrong to do so. Time and time again congregations have also made survival of the "local" the locus of their life. Congregants want to make sure that their needs are met before the church reaches out to meet the needs of the world. Recently I had a retired pastor tell me that the purpose of the church is to worship…not to reach out in worldwide redemptive work…in other words all religion is to be local. The challenge for us as a community of Jesus followers however is to remember that Jesus called us to follow him out into the world, not simply to remain comfortably behind our beautiful walls. While religion is to be local…it is to be balanced with our commitment to the poor, the hungry, the stranger and the child whose voices are often hard to hear.
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