To Follow Jesus* *in America (10.16.22)
To Follow Jesus* *in America
Philippians 2:5-12 and Galatians 2:16-21
It’s the time of year that a lot of pastors talk about stewardship and our relationship to money as we finish out one year’s budget and move toward another. Given that we’re in the midst of a tremendous Capital Campaign (which you can hear more about if you stay for today’s Congregational Meeting following worship) and we’re talking about money a lot already, we’re really already in a stewardship season when it comes to financial resources.
But as I say most every week before the Call to Give when we collect a financial offering, money is but one way that we give of our lives. In a faith community, we are constantly giving of our time, our energy, our creativity, our giftedness. Maybe you sometimes wonder “WHY?” Why are we asked to give of ourselves? Why do pastors ask for money and volunteering and showing up to stuff? Why isn’t this time just about me showing up to hear platitudes that make me feel better about my life and less alone?
Fair questions. Questions I’ve asked myself quite a lot, particularly as one who attended church 1 out of 17 weeks during sabbatical. My fantasy was to sleep in or go to brunch. What a Sunday! Living like the modern world! But by the end of August, I found myself feeling a bit rudderless. Like one accustomed to the academic year who passes the school supply section at Target and no longer has an excuse to buy fresh crayons and folders and sharpened pencils for kids now grown, a Sunday morning without a faith community can leave an emptiness for me, a restlessness; a longing for experiencing an us-ness and not just me, alone, doing whatever it is I want to do.
Last week I asked these four questions, and today I’ll hold them before us again:
What is this thing we are doing?
What is this particular and peculiar life together we are seeking?
How is it so many different kinds of people can show up in churches across the country, read similar translations of ancient texts, and come to very different conclusions about life and love and neighbor?
What does it actually mean to follow Jesus?
For the next three weeks, I’d like to attempt answering some of these questions. I say attempt because I’m the only one speaking, so I can’t fully represent all of our voices. But I can tell you what I think this thing of choosing to still be church in our culture is about.
I also want to name my bias before we really dive in: I already have opinions about each of these questions. I already have some answers formed and swirling in my head–particularly about the 3rd one and how different kinds of people come to very different conclusions. I want to name my bias because I’m very aware it accompanies me when I approach the biblical text. I am not sure I can untangle if my biases are formed by the scripture that has so long spoken to me or if my biases guide the parts of scripture I choose and the parts I leave behind.
While churches may be moving into stewardship season, the political world around us is gearing up for midterm elections. There is a lot of language already in play in the political arena about how to approach and make meaning of ancient texts and what it means to follow Jesus. In this election cycle, you will likely hear the term “Christian Nationalism” over and over again. Much like the word “woke,” there is now one group of people who has used that term positively to mean growth in awareness and consciousness as one awakens to the layers of social injustice and inequity in our world. Another group uses that term pejoratively, often accompanied by mob (the woke mob) to mean aggressively militant progressives with a chip on their shoulder and an agenda on a clipboard to make the world over in their image.
The “us” and “them” is un-nuanced and unfortunate, but such is the world of 24-hour news cycles and divisive partisan politics. How then might we step into this conversation carefully? Well, naming our biases up front is one way. Naming a desire to proceed with caution is another.
The term Christian Nationalism brings out my Baptist roots like few other topics can. My children tell me when I’m on the phone talking to my mother that my Southern-ness comes out on full display and suddenly you can hear without a doubt that I’m from Mobile, Alabama. I don’t think I could force whatever that accent is if I tried, but my mama brings it out in me. I think it’s very similar for witnessing the church welcome the state into its pulpits and fellowship halls and the state being overly represented by one theological voice and ideology in the halls of Congress, the bench of the Supreme Court, and the Oval Office. Suddenly, my Baptist roots show and demand full freedom.
The founders of this country were as concerned as I am about what happens when Church and State are overly intertwined. They had witnessed that intermingling in England and did not want to repeat the model of a king or emperor or president dictating what goes on in communities of faith or a pope or priest or vicar mandating what goes on in the halls of government. For that reason, the very first words of the very first amendment to the constitution read:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
The two clauses of the introduction to the first amendment guard against the government establishing religion or preventing citizens from freely practicing the religion of their conscience. They are referred to as the establishment and free exercise clauses.
Why am I making a detour in not just one but three sermons (yep, this is going to take a little time) to talk about the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States? Because I want you to have both awareness of a major theme in this upcoming election cycle and some rootedness in why (again my bias) I think that major theme is critical for us as people of faith and citizens of this nation–particularly as we ask those four questions I am holding.
In his essay A Strange Love?, author Mark Hamilton writes, “Christan Nationalism is the engine that drives white American evangelical politics. It is the ideology…that the United States is intended by God to be a Chrsitian nation.”
In her book The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, Katherine Stewart notes, “This movement is a form of nationalism because it purports to derive its legitimacy from its claim to represent a specific identity unique to and representative of the American nation.” To which Obery M. Hendricks adds, “Christian nationalism not only purveys the myth that America was founded as a Christian nation but also that it should be governed according to the biblical precepts that Christian nationalists themselves identify as germane.”
For the handful of us who vividly remember the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, another way to frame this is: they didn’t stop with the seminaries. Their eyes were always on the highest power of the land.
Having framed the term Chrsitian Nationalism as I just did, the term can only be heard in the negative, right? No, not at all. Already we hear prominent evangelical leaders, enmeshed in what has become a hybrid, far-right mashup of Eagle, Flag, and Cross, proudly owning the title Christian Nationalism. One representative from Georgia is now selling tshirts with the term Christian Nationalist proudly emblazoned on the front.
The First Baptist Church of Atlanta just hosted the Pray, Vote, Stand Summit which began with a prayer, the pledge of allegiance, and the singing of the national anthem in the sanctuary of that faith community. Simply put, if you are a Christian nationalist, then hearing all of those quotes above doesn’t land dissonantly on the ears.
The free exercise and establishment clauses in the first amendment aren’t talking about Christian Nationalism, though, they are describing what is known as the principal of Religious Liberty. The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (or BJC) defines “Religious Liberty” as “the freedom to believe and exercise or act upon religious conscience without unnecessary interference by the government. Just as religious liberty involves the freedom to practice religion, it also means freedom not to practice religion. If you can’t say ‘no,’ your ‘yes’ is meaningless.”
In other words, this gathering is voluntary and not coerced. This collective of moms and dads and grandparents and children and teenagers and octogenarians and nonagenarians chooses freely to gather, to ask questions, to make sense of what we find in our study and worship, and to live out that faith in the world without either governmental oppression and censure or preferential treatment.
This thing we are doing every week is shaping and forming us for how we live and move and have our being in this world. It is not separate at all from the way we live in this nation, but it is also neither coerced nor endorsed by the empire.
My colleague Andy Thayer, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, uses the image of being in a foreign country and finding yourself in urgent need of a U.S. Embassy. Perhaps that pouch you so diligently carried–the one with passports, COVID vax cards, and IDs–fell into the river Seine and you don’t know how you will get home. When you walk into that embassy, you are walking onto a tiny plot of U.S. land. You cross the threshold and see American flags, are welcomed as a citizen of that place, and speak with people who share your understanding of home.
The church, he suggests, is like an embassy of God’s kingdom in the world. When we walk into the doors of this place, we are somehow being transported into a culture, a people, a land that is different from what is around it. Why would there be flags of other kingdoms here? Why would there be pledges of allegiance to other lands? This place is shaped by our ultimate home.
Our 1st and 3rd readings today both come from the epistles in the New Testament–those letters being exchanged back and forth with 1st century gatherings of new churches.
In the letter to the Philippians, the church is admonished to “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” The epistle writer then lays out this beautiful poetry of what that looked like in Jesus–kenosis or the self-emptying Christ who became flesh/incarnated and modeled humble servanthood even to the point of being crucified as a threat to the empire. Let THIS same mind be in you.
And turning to Galatians, we listen in on a more complex conversation about Gentile Christians’ relationship to Judaism. At this point in the formation of the church, while having Jewish roots and heritage, Chrsitianity is emerging as something separate from Judaism. The question Paul is answering has to do with how a person comes to be a follower of Christ. Does one have to convert to 1st century Judaism first? In their commentary on Galatians in the Jewish Annotated New Testament, Shaye J.D. Cohen observes, “By rejecting works of law, Paul might be thought to be nullifying the grace of God, who gave Israel the Torah. Paul denies he is doing this. In fact, he discusses why God gave the Torah in [chapter] 3.”
Paul’s answer does not diminish Jewish identity–rather, he is saying that being a disciple of Jesus is not about the Torah even if the Torah informed Jesus. To be a follower of Christ is about faith in Christ. Paul writes, “we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we might be justified by faith in Christ.”
In both letters, Paul is guiding the churches he loves to pursue their identities in the person of Christ himself–not a sister religion, not the empire around them. To live as a Christian means embodying the ways of Christ. To diminish Jesus to the role of ticket puncher for a train to heaven or partisan hack who helps get you elected is to deny the essence of the gospels!
In his latest book, Do I Stay Christian?, Brian McLaren writes, “the purpose of the Christian faith is clear and simple: it is not an evacuation plan for heaven but a transformation plan for earth, a transformation plan built on the strategy of helping people become loving human beings who build loving societies, following the loving example of Jesus…After two thousand years…it’s about time for the Christian religion to get serious about its prime directive.”
Of course our prime directive shapes the work we prioritize, the causes we champion, the way we cast our ballots, the love we embody in this world. Our prime directive of becoming loving human beings who build loving societies and follow the loving example of Jesus also means we hold space for people who think differently from us, believe differently from us, or choose to altogether walk away from this whole religious enterprise. Love itself cannot be coercive.
As Paul writes to yet another early church, “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.8 Love never ends.”
For some 50 years, the Supreme Court has used the three-pronged Lemon Test to determine whether a law or governmental activity violates the establishment clause of the first amendment. I thought of this as I read through Paul’s letters, McLaren’s words, the teachings and stories of Jesus. It seems the Love Test might help us answer the question, “Is it of Christ?”
What are we championing for our world? Whether in the voting booth or the Rouse’s checkout lane, what are we embodying as we move through this world? That seems to me a much better standard of how Christians are called to engage as citizens and neighbors than legislating late 20th century evangelical Christian doctrine. Is it envious? Is it boastful? Is it arrogant or rude? Or: Is it patient? Is it kind? Does it bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things?
If our rhetoric, our practices, our way of engaging our neighbors, our approach to the governance of our city and state and nation, our most private moments and most public ones are not guided and shaped by this love God, fully revealed in Jesus the Christ, then we are failing to take on the mind of Christ. And THAT is the call on us as long as we continue to profess this faith. Amen.