A Sermon preached on July 3rd, Pentecost VII
at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden
Isaiah 66: 10 – 14,
Galatians 6: 7 – 16, Luke 10: 1 – 11, 16 – 20
“Do not be
deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow.” When I first read
this sentence from this morning’s reading from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians
(6:1), I thought for a moment that it sounded like a commentary on what is
going on in GB right now, after the Brexit vote. There was a lot of deceiving,
and there is now a lot of reaping of what was sown – including outright racist
attacks on EU migrants. If people still knew their Bible, perhaps the Brexit
supporters would not be so surprised that so far everything the experts
predicted has come true. Then Nigel Farage, the head of the so-called UKIP declared
June 23 to be UK Independence Day, which I found a little ironic as most
Independence Day celebrations around the world celebrate that country’s
declaration of independence from the United Kingdom. The very first instance
was of course the event we are commemorating today, and our American members
will be celebrating tomorrow: July 4, US Independence Day. That set me thinking,
what does God have to say about nations and independence and sovereignty?
Clearly, the US
founding fathers thought that God had something to say. The preamble to the
Declaration of Independence contains that beautiful, well-known phrase:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that
among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." I know that
according to the modern secular myth, human rights are independent of religion,
or even the result of a struggle with religion, but that is just not true as
the preamble to the declaration reminds us. For Christians human rights are
God-given rights. We are all equal because we are all equally made in God’s
image. We value life and all lives because they are a gift from our Creator, who
wants us to live these lives abundantly. God wants us to be happy – in union
with God – but gives us freedom and free will to choose when, whether and how
we do that.
A nation’s purpose
is to guarantee these rights and to create an environment in which they can
flourish. The new, young American nation unfortunately initially restricted
this guarantee to a minority of its population. The self-evident truth that all
men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights, was only
applied to European, white men. But still, the principle was established and
became both a template for many other nations, as well as the basis for all the
struggles for justice by those groups that had been excluded: African
Americans, women, Native Americans, LGBT people etc.
The Old Testament
is the story of how God chose a nation, Israel, to be a light to all the world,
to be a shining example of faithfulness, peace, justice, and righteousness. This
is the image that John Winthrop, the puritan and pilgrim father, refers to in
his famous sermon before landing in what became New England: “Now the only way
to … to provide for our posterity is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly,
to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God …. We shall be as a city upon a
hill—the eyes of all people are upon us.”[1]
Unfortunately, the
Old Testament is also the story of how Israel did not live up this ideal. When Christians
read Isaiah’s (42:1, 6) great promise “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my
chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring
forth justice to the nations. … I have given you as a covenant to the people, a
light to the nations,” we think of Jesus Christ and of how Simeon applies this
calling to be “a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your
people Israel” to a person, Jesus, not to a nation. (Luke 2:32)
In today’s final
selection from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, partially written in Paul’s own
hand because it was so important, Paul preaches against the illusion of self-reliance
and against national and ethnic identifiers. “May I never boast of anything
except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified
to me, and I to the world.” Paul is telling the Galatians that the people who
have tried to persuade them to become part of Israel, to accept the law, to be
circumcised as a sign of belonging to that nation, that they are wrong. The sign
behind which we gather as Christians, is the cross. We are called to boast not
of “Great Britain” or a great America, but of the cross. And when we “boast” of
the cross, we are proclaiming our dependence on God, on God’s grace and God’s favor.
Paul even coins the term of the “Israel of God,” to describe a new community
made up of people of faith whose primary allegiance is to God and God’s Son and
who are called to work nor for their own good, but for the good of all.
According to Luke,
Jesus sends out the 70 others, or in some translations 72, to proclaim the kingdom
of God, and not an earthly kingdom. The number 70 or 72 is already an
indication that their mission transcends national boundaries as 70 or 72, again
depending on the source, is the number of the nations of the world in the table
of nations found in Genesis (10:2-31). When Jesus tells them to carry no purse,
no bag, no sandals he wants them to model dependence, to trust not in their own
strength or possessions, but in God, and to be reliant on the hospitality of
those they visit. Their message is peace, their gift healing, the promise – or for
some the warning – they bring with them is that the kingdom of God is near: not
a newly triumphant kingdom of Israel, but a new society built on God’s values.
Nations come and nations
go, nations are not holy, nations are not to be worshipped – that is also
idolatry. We need structures and organizations to organize our common life, to guarantee
our basic human rights, and to create and preserve environments in which we can
grow and flourish. The United States of America, whose founding 240 years ago,
we celebrate this weekend was a conscious attempt to create a new state, open
to people from every nation, embodying these principles, and based on an
allegiance not to a monarch or a particular ethnicity. As a human endeavor, it is
not perfect, but has nevertheless been a model for the whole world, so I will
happily go on record as saying it was a good idea, and Happy Independence Day America.
However, our
readings this morning remind us that our ultimate allegiance is to Christ, that
we depend on one another, and that we are called to cooperation beyond our
human nations and divisions, for the good of all. Former Archbishop Rowan
Williams writes: "The Christian imperative is to hold up the model of a
truly interdependent world in which the welfare of each is inseparable from the
welfare of all, nationally and globally; the model of the Body of Christ."
Tomorrow is Independence Day, but every day is interdependence day … so Happy
Interdependence Day everyone.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment