LOVE OF COUNTRY AS MINISTRY OF WITNESS

Sermon preached by the Rev. Michael Anderson Bullock

[Deuteronomy 10:17-21; Hebrews 11:8-16; Matthew 5:43-48]

I love my country, but it is not my religion.

This is an important statement because it responds to the question I believe that everyone needs to make: namely, what is the source of your life’s standards?  And underneath this question lies the fact – surprising as it so often is – that everyone is religious.  As I have reminded you many times before, the problem is what we worship, what we hold as the defining center of our identity, our integrity as human beings.

For us who gather week after week to worship as Christians in this place, we encounter any number of reminders about what we are called to keep at the center.  And keeping in mind the ancient truth that the way we pray shapes the way we live, the words we know as the “Collect for Purity (“Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid…” – that one – The “Collect for Purity” speaks to the essential reason for our worship: namely, that we may not hide from the love and life of God so that, in turn, we may magnify God’s love and life in our lives.

Yet, most specifically, it is the sacramental worship of Holy Communion that gives us what we need and cannot provide for ourselves: namely, an unbreakable relationship with the Creator of heaven and earth.  At which point, Jesus’ own words clarify the meaning of who we are and Whose we are.  The Lord directs us to “do this in remembrance of me”.

So, what’s the connection between what we do and what we choose to remember when it comes to claiming life, Communion-life with God-in-Christ?  Or is our sense of remembering limited to a transactional perspective of “what have you done for me lately”?

I love my country, but it is not my religion.

This is one of the abiding issues addressed in the Old Testament lesson from Deuteronomy.  It is one of the scriptures that is specifically appointed for “Independence Day”.  The biblical writer knows how conveniently limited our memory is.  As my father was fond of saying, “My memory’s good, but it’s short!”  It was to this same “short” memory that Deuteronomy’s message consistently is addressed.  Today’s lesson reminds Israel of what needs to be held at the center, that God is God and that God’s nature is rooted in justice and truth.  And the God-truth to be remembered is (quoting Jesus) “those to whom much is given, much is required.”1  Or in other words, “do this in remembrance of me”.

The Deuteronomic reading reminds God’s people not only to love their neighbor as themselves but more than that they are specifically to love those vulnerable ones whom society finds easy to ignore: the orphan who can’t vote; the widow who is after all only a woman; and the stranger who is an easy mark for tyrants as they seek to bolster their own political power.  So it is that the scripture reminds Israel that they, too, were strangers in an oppressive regime and that this historical memory needs to produce compassion for those who lack humane protection.  It’s a matter of religion shaping how we live, and how we are organized to live is (lest we forget!) what politics is always about.  Yet, the oft-neglected issue is the question of what lies at the heart of one’s politics.  And if the way we pray shapes the way we live, perhaps, then, politics needs to be seen as sharing the very things that shape our own lives.

The first commandment is this: Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is the only Lord.  Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.  The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself.  There is no other commandment greater than these.2

Faith in action.

I wonder if, in the emotional make-up of this country, the statement on the plaque of the “Statue of Liberty” is America’s secular expression of the biblical “Summary of the Law”.

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!3

But in this country, at this time, it seems that we have forgotten that this statement drew so many of our own families to this land.  It is said that the uniqueness of America is that it was founded upon an idea, an idea where new life was possible.  Or put more directly, as followers of Jesus what is our theology of politics?

What is the source of our standards?  Which is to say in fact: What is our religion?  In what ways do we express in the way we live what we keep at the center?  What, then, is the relationship between our God and our politics?

The word “politics” stems from the Latin term “polis”, that is, “the city” – the place where we live and how the “city” works.  What principles affect the “city’s” functioning?  From the beginning we Americans have been steeped in the important distinction between “politics” and “religion”, “church and state”, to the extent that the First Amendment of the Constitution, in the language of the “Establishment Clause”, creates an important line that separates “religion” from dictating how the “city” (the “polis”) is run.  While free individuals must make “political” decisions based on what is most important to them in their lives, such decisions are, nonetheless, the point where “religion” resides because such decisions come from what each of us together hold to be sacred, most important.

What is the source of your standards?  More pointedly for followers of Jesus, do our baptismal vows identify those standards?  And if they do, I believe that this is the point that indicates what the church is about and what “Christian politics” might offer.  At the very least, we should discuss the connection.

N. T. Wright, one of the most influential and respected biblical scholars of our time (and a retired Anglican bishop), says that the “gateway” to political theology concerns the idea that, until Christ returns, “God wants humans to be in charge”.  And while (according to scripture) all political powers have in some sense been “ordained by God”, Christians are to take the lead in holding office holders and power brokers accountable.4  Consequently, Wright says the church is designed to be the small working model of God’s new creation.  The church is to hold up before the world a symbol – an effective sign of what God has promised to do for the whole world.  The church, therefore, is meant to encourage the rest of the world to say, “Oh, that’s what human community ought to look like.  That’s how it’s done.”5

Now, in case you never realized it before, this sense of the church’s identity and its imperfect historical record are precisely the reason that in our worship we confess our sins – not merely for our personal failures but also for the incompleteness of our community’s witness as Christ’s Body for the sake of the world.  We as a church have a lot to confess.  We should always remember this.  Yet, remembering the formative words of my first rector and priestly mentor, as poor an example of God’s calling and life as the church often is, the church is the only institution that regularly and publicly confesses its faults.  Our government does not.  Our corporations do not.  Alas, the Red Sox do not!

Do this in remembrance of me.

Those to whom much is given, much is required.

God-in-Christ has given us what we need and cannot provide for ourselves.  Say “thank you” for the gift.  Share the gift, don’t hoard it.  This three-part statement has been the theological template I have suggested to you as a way to keep what is at the center clear and clean.  How we acknowledge, thank, and share the God-life personally and publicly is the core of biblical politics and sets the stage for the content of Christian politics.  Consequently, followers of Jesus – people like us – have what is (in fact) a ministry – a prophetic ministry -- to the Nation.  This means that we pray for our country and for all who direct its life, even as that spiritual commitment of care demands that we unwaveringly speak justice’s critical truth to our leaders and people.

Citizenship as ministry.  Identity as Christ’s Body.  Being witnesses of the God-life – for the sake of the nation and the world.

How do our politics reflect what we profess to believe as God’s beloved people?  To be sure, we are not “perfect” in this, in working toward what Lincoln called “a more perfect union”.  So, we pray to remember our mission to the nation – in words and sentiments similar to these:

Grant, O God, that your holy and life-giving Spirit may move every human heart, especially the hearts of the people of this land, that barriers that divide us may crumble, suspicions disappear, and hatreds cease; that our divisions being healed, we may live in justice and peace, through Jesus Christ our Lord.6

May this prayer continually shape our lives and be a reminder of what we are to reflect in all we do.  And we pray that God will keep this nation under his care and guide us in the ways of justice and truth.   Amen.

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1.  Luke 12:48

2.  Mark 12:29-31

3.  Emma Lazarus. The New Colossus

4.  N.T. Wright. What Jesus Would Say to the “Empire” Today”, an interview by Stefani McDade

5.  Ibid

6.  Adapted from the Book of Common Prayer