Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, a member of Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church, offers his take on faith in the public square

LOUISVILLE — To launch a four-week faith formation series on Sunday based on Matthew 25, Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church in Denver turned to one of its members to speak from his heart on his experience not fighting, but leading, City Hall.

Before worship on Sunday, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston delivered a thoughtful session that can be viewed here. Johnston, a former school principal and state senator who was a senior education advisor to President Obama, is introduced at the 22:45 mark. “I’m delighted to be here,” he told his fellow church members, “and a little intimidated.”

The question for today, the mayor said, is “how does a person of faith show up in a moment of such profound conflict?” Using his father’s Bible, Johnston read from the Judgment of the Nations, including Matthew 25:35-40 and, a bit later, verses 41-46.

Among the dilemmas that confront people of faith today is “how do you face the question of the choice between fighting and forgiveness,” he said. “When things you value the most are challenged, when do you choose to fight?”

A few weeks ago, Johnston was with his daughter in Washington, D.C., to scout college choices for her brother. After visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “what I saw stunned me,” he said. A Latino man delivering hot food from a restaurant had been stopped by three masked agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who were demanding to see the man’s immigration papers. Johnston’s daughter said they had to stop their ride back to the hotel and help the man, but by the time they got out of the car and walked the block where he’d been, the man was gone, and his delivery bicycle was being loaded into a police vehicle.

“My daughter looked at me as if to say, how is this possible?” Johnston said. “How is it possible in the nation’s capital, a mile away from the Holocaust Museum? Can you simply grab someone off the street, put them in a vehicle and disappear them without public consequence?”

While Jesus’ instruction in Matthew 25 is to care for those who are hungry, naked, without a home or in prison, Johnston wondered aloud what are the consequences for people who don’t do as they’re told. “If you watch those stories on TV and feel moved to fight,” he said, “that is very human and I would say a very Christian instinct.”

Johnston asked his large audience: How do we show up in these moments and what do we do?

He told the story of “a loud critic of mine,” whom Johnston decided to visit at the man’s farm outside Denver. The two talked for an hour aboard the man’s combine, harvesting wheat. For the first 20 minutes or so, the man told Johnston about the mayor’s stances that angered him, including reproductive choice, guns and immigration.

“Then I asked about his family, his values and his faith,” Johnston said. He told the man what neighborhood he lived in, a section of Denver the man knew well. As a boy, the man’s father would pack him in a pickup truck and take him to the neighborhood, the home to most of the city’s homeless shelters. The man’s father would invite a few men to get in the truck and come work the harvest on the farm, where they’d be fed and provided a bed and clothing.

“In that moment, I thought, wow!” Johnston said. “There are many beliefs we have convinced ourselves we’re on the opposite side of.” This man was “deeply committed” to living out Matthew 25, Johnston noted. “It doesn’t mean we agreed to let go of the things we disagreed on,” he said, “but it means we agree to recommit to the things that we know bind us to the call that we are to love the Lord and to love our neighbor.”

“It’s not a hard day for me when Donald Trump threatens to put me in jail, or [White House Border Czar] Tom Homan says he thinks I’m a disgrace to the city,” Johnston said. “The hard days are when your cousin posts on Instagram that you’ve destroyed the city by letting all the illegals come in.”

After tracing the stories of Judas’ and Peter’s betrayals, Johnston said the way to atone “is by actually proving that you will be the one to pick up 10 people in your truck downtown and go and serve them. … It requires forgiveness, but that forgiveness is not about coming back to ‘my feelings are whole and I feel good again,’ but that we have reunited around a purpose that’s bigger than us. To me, that’s the ultimate question, and I think that is the ultimate challenge we face right now.”

Johnston read an essay he wrote eight years ago, noting “we gave up on politics in the public square” and “conceded to feeling less proud of who we are and what we stand for,” themes he said resonate today.

“We saw in every stranger a potential enemy,” he read. “We doubted the goodness of our neighbors and we gave up on the idea of a nation indivisible.”

“What both fighting and retreating have in common is they make us smaller and weaker and more alone,” Johnston read. “When we are fighting we are so focused on who is standing opposite us that we forget to see who is standing right beside us.”

The essence of democracy “is it calls on our ability to do something that feels unnatural: to love those who are different than us, to knock on the door of a complete stranger or to start a conversation on a street corner,” he said. “It calls on us not to fight or retreat, but to recklessly, faithfully, openly, love back.”

During a question and answer session, Johnston said his reading of Matthew’s gospel and other biblical passages points to this lesson: “The willingness to turn the other cheek never means a willingness to compromise on your values.”

“As a former school principal, I had many of my former students who were undocumented who when they finally got citizenship, the first thing they did was join the U.S. Army or the National Guard,” he said. “They would say to me, ‘Mr. Johnston, don’t be mad at me. I want to go to college eventually. I just want to give something back to the country that’s given me so much.’”

After the church’s co-pastor, the Rev. Clover Reuter Beal, thanked Johnston for sharing his faith, the mayor grinned.

“I don’t often speak with the Bible in my hand, that is true,” he said.