OUR TRUE COUNTRY
Matthew 25:31-40, Revelation 21:22-26
Today's sermon is part 2 of a two-part series on faith and politics. And in case you weren't here last week, or if you were here and might need a little refresher, I wanted to restate basically the main point I was trying to communicate in that sermon. The main point of my sermon last week was this: that the Kingdom that Jesus came to inaugurate, which he called the Kingdom of God, or the Reign of God, is not an earthly kingdom. I said that Jesus did not intend to use a political means to create the Reign of God. And that the Kingdom of God, or Reign of God, is a spiritual reality. And that we can't identify what Jesus came to create with any human agenda, with any human ideology or earthly leader. And as the bumper sticker goes, "God is not a Republican or a Democrat." And we reflected on the danger of identifying God's agenda with any human agenda as we looked at Germany in the 1930s, and that danger writ large as Adolph Hitler had in fact co-opted the agenda of the church. German church leaders in the 30's were saying that Hitler's agenda is God's agenda. That is the ultimate perversion of the gospel.
Here's where we begin today. I didn't get much criticism last week, I was a little disappointed, you see. That may not be the case today--we'll see! Initially we might think that that tack that I just described might lead us to the understanding that we can create a nice, clean division between matters of faith and matters of politics. Jesus' Kingdom is spiritual; politics is earthly; and therefore the one has nothing to do with the other. Today I want to suggest to you that that is not true. I don't believe that it's true.
I'd like to explore how faith has a bearing on our common life together, and therefore our political life. That though we can't identify the Kingdom of Heaven with any earthly agenda, it still has implications for how we live our lives together. And by the way, I think that's a really good basic working definition for politics. Politics, if you look it up in Merriam-Webster's dictionary, is simply the art and science of government, of living together. And if our faith somehow doesn't have to do with that, then one might say, "What good is faith?" It is about the art, as St. Augustine would say (one of my favorites--I'm a fan of Augustine)…politics is the art of attaining earthly peace, the means by which we get along together--which is different from heavenly peace, the kind of peace that we experience in the Kingdom of God.
And since we're talking about the great theologian Augustine, the point that I'd like to suggest today is that knowing the peace of heaven, as St. Augustine might speak of it, knowing that we are citizens of the City of God, having faith that God has given us that citizenship, has implications for how we live our life now, as we live in the earthly city. In other words, if we know our ultimate hope, which is greater than any earthly hope, I want to suggest that that hope is inherently political. It has to do with our life now, and I'm afraid we can't quite avoid that.
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Jesus' ministry--his intention to inaugurate the Kingdom of Heaven--points humanity to a hope that goes beyond the mere fulfillment of our earthly desire for comfort or worldly peace. And what Jesus proclaimed, and what we believe as Christians, and what you may not realize, or we may not affirm enough, is that what we believe as Christians is that God, through Jesus Christ, has already secured the ultimate destiny of the world. Through Jesus Christ crucified and risen again, God has already defeated every power of sin and death through that act. And so our job as people of faith is simply to live in light of that victory. I do this weekly Bible study--and a member of that group, my friend Kevin, said, "The church has won! Therefore it doesn't need to fight." The image that we literally almost saw, in that reading from Revelation that Maggie just read….If you ever read the book of Revelation, it's really a book of pictures, and it provides for us images of that hope in which we trust as Christians. It provides us with an image of the ultimate destiny of every person of faith, and of the world. The heavenly Jerusalem that comes down from Heaven, and dwells upon the earth. And that hope has implications for how we live our life today. Hope, such hope as that, is political.
Let me give just a few examples of how I think that works. Some of you may have read a book by Stephen Covey called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And in that book Stephen Covey has this phrase called, "Putting last things first." Beginning with the end in mind. And so what that means is focusing our attention upon the destination toward which we're going. And if we know where we're going, that has implications for where we are now. He even suggests that we think about our own funeral…what we would want people to be saying at our funeral. And if we have that in mind, that might guide us in our living today. And so hope--the ultimate hope that comes from knowing that our citizenship is of that true country that is God's city--if we know our citizenship in that true country, it has implications for how we live today. It certainly did for Jesus of Nazareth, if we want to take a moment to reflect upon that.
As I was suggesting last week, the cross, on which Jesus was crucified, is a symbol of Roman political execution. They didn't give that means of death to just anyone. The cross was reserved for slaves and insurrectionists. People who the Romans thought were a threat to Roman power. So Jesus must have been something of a threat to the Romans. You see, the places for crucifixions were located in very public places, and the vertical crossbeam would have been somewhere that people would pass by, as a reminder: don't try to mess with the power of Rome! And people who were crucified were crucified in public, the message being, "Don't hope in this hope." Don't hope in this man, because it's hopeless.
What they tried to do by crucifying Jesus was to cow his followers into submission. But as we all know, it was rather unsuccessful, wasn't it? The Romans feared the Christians so much because they refused to bow down to Caesar, and acknowledge the sovereignty of Caesar. They were so hard to control because one could not torture or kill them into submission, because they knew that Caesar had no power over their lives, and they knew their ultimate hope rested not in the earthly city of Caesar, but in the City of God.
You see, the word for martyr comes from both Latin and Greek roots that have to do with being a witness. Someone who has witnessed the ultimate hope of life, and bears witness to that hope in their death. And so the kind of hope and joy that we know as citizens of the Kingdom of God, far from making us passive and indifferent to the great challenges and issues of our common life, spurs us toward passionate involvement with such issues. Spurs us, as citizens of the Kingdom of God, to represent, as ambassadors, the peace of God in the earthly city. Even though it is God who has ultimately secured that destiny, we are partners with God as we bear witness to that hope and that reality.
This is a story that's always been helpful to me, to kind of keep in perspective the relationship between this kind of hope and our earthly involvement in political stuff. It's a story that a friend of mine told about a Roman Catholic nun who was arrested for breaking into a nuclear facility and pouring pig's blood on a nuclear missile. And of course, was arrested and given 20 years or so in prison. And a reporter from the National Catholic Reporter interviewed this Roman Catholic nun and asked her, "What did you think you'd accomplish by doing this? What do you think will be accomplished by your act?" And the woman responded by saying, "I wasn't trying to accomplish anything, because I believe that the ultimate redemption of the world has already been accomplished through Christ on the cross. And I'm simply trying to live in light of that moment."
Let's take a look, then, at the scripture lesson that we heard today, from Matthew 25. That also is a picture of our ultimate hope. It's an apocalyptic text; in other words, it's a text that takes place at the end of time. And we have in that story a picture of Jesus on a throne, and interestingly, if you listen to that text closely, it says that, "Before the throne of Christ, all the nations of the world will be assembled." Not all the people, but all the ethnae, in Greek--all the peoples. Suggesting that this business of securing earthly justice is a kind of collective enterprise. And suggesting that as we look to that ultimate hope, our job now is to bear witness to such hope in the here and now: in feeding the hungry; in caring for the sick, in visiting those in prison; in giving welcome to the stranger. That's our job now as we bear witness to this hope. Knowing that it's ultimately not our task to secure the peace of Heaven, but simply to bear witness to it.
Now there's one final thought, and maybe a little bit of a left turn before I finish this little miniseries about faith and politics. I apologize--I hope my voice will hold out for the rest of the day today. One of the biggest concerns that this group expressed--the two groups that assembled to talk about faith and politics with me--was this: Why do I get to get up here and say what I think about the gospel? You know? I have the power of this pulpit, and no one else does. I have to say that that is a responsibility, and privilege, and burden that I take very seriously, and sometimes, I have to say, afflicts me.
In one of Flannery O'Connor's great short stories--one of my favorites, called Revelation--it's about a group of people waiting in a doctor's office waiting room. It's a great metaphor for life itself, isn't it? We're all waiting to see the physician, aren't we, in this life? But it's about a main character named Ruby Turpin, who is sort of a self-righteous middle-class woman who keeps thanking Jesus for creating her just the way she is--not like black people or white trash. And as this college student is listening to the conversation happening in the waiting room, she takes a book, her college textbook called Human Development, and flings it across the waiting room, and it hits Ruby Turpin right square between the eyes.
In some ways I think that's the job of the preacher. It's, first of all, to feel the hit between our own eyes, that comes not from me, but from this book. And to take this book, and the words in it, and understand how, unless it disturbs us and hits us between the eyes, then we're not really reading it very closely. The job of the preacher is to see how the words of this text speak to the great problems that face us. But it's not my opinion that I want you to listen to. Each of us has a conscience, and that is a very important concept for us as people in the reformed tradition. And if we're really applying our conscience to this Word, our conscience will be afflicted. And so, if I say something that you disagree with, I'm hoping that it's the Word of God afflicting your conscience, and not my opinion disagreeing with yours.
Somehow if I don't say something with which you disagree at least once a year, perhaps the preacher isn't doing his job. But in the creative enterprise that is the preaching, the word of God is borne on the feeble words of the preacher's sermon, the Word preached, but the real sermon is what's heard: that creative process is the communal enterprise of trying to understand how this book speaks to us in our real life, and the great issues of the day, which depends on the speaking and hearing of the Word; and that process ought to afflict us at times, not just comfort us in the face of the great injustices that are all too obvious in our common life.
In our discussion in that group, we each were reflecting on how important it was in Nazi Germany for the church, the confessing churches, to speak against Hitler. And, you know, all of can see how, yes, that's important to do. It's important to speak prophetically about those issues with which I agree. It may be harder for us today to understand how that works, and how this Word might afflict us. That's why we need each other; to keep trying to understand how this word applies to the real, political and moral issues of our time.
And so my prayer for us, as we engage in this adventure of seeking to know how God's Word speaks to the very real situation of our life in this earthly city, is that we might do that not from the basis of our own sense of rightness or wisdom, but humbly to turn to this book, with the sense that God's rightness, and God's wisdom, is contained in it. And so to the adventure that is that Word, onward!
Amen.
November 11, 2007
The Reverend Jeffrey A. Vamos
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