Sunday, December 31, 2017

Church and State




A Sermon preached on 31st December 2017, Christmas I, at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden
Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7; John 1:1-18


If you have been living in Germany for a while, you will know that today is not referred to as New Year’s Eve, but just as “Silvester.” It is named after Pope Sylvester I whose feast day it is today, although he had nothing to do with fireworks, drinking sparkling wine, or eating fondue. It is his feast day today simply because he died on 31st December, over 1,600 years ago in 335 AD. 

We do not know much about Sylvester, although he was Pope during an important and turbulent era in the history of the Christian Church. The Council of Nicaea took place during his pontificate: out of which developed what we call the Nicene Creed, and which defines some of the basics of what we believe about God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Constantine was the Roman emperor. So, this was the time when Christianity changed from being, at best a tolerated sect, to becoming the established religion of the Roman Empire! This was the beginning of what we call Christendom, a society nominally built around Christian values. Others have called it the beginning of the Babylonian captivity of the Church to the State and the world. 

It is perhaps therefore not a coincidence that a few hundred years later, the doctrine of papal supremacy and the forged Donation of Constantine were backdated to this period. In the fictional account the Emperor Constantine was cured of leprosy by the virtue of the baptismal water administered by Sylvester and out of gratitude supposedly transferred authority over Rome and the western part of the Roman Empire to the Pope. It sounds like an attempt to reverse the dependency of the church on the state that dates from Sylvester’s pontificate.  

In his letter to the Galatians, Paul looks back to the time when “we were imprisoned and guarded under the law,” (Gal. 3:23) until God releases us: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.” (Gal. 4:4-5) In the prologue to his Gospel, John has a similar description of this change of priorities: “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” (John 1:17)

The law that both Paul and John are referring to here is not the law of the Roman Empire that Christianity became part of, but the Mosaic law, that detailed and extensive system of laws set in place to guide the conduct of the Jewish people: their worship, diet, and rituals, but also issues of ownership, dealing with debt and disagreement, and many other aspects of human relationships. Before Paul put his faith in Christ, he says, he lived under the supervision of the law. But after he put his faith in Christ, his life was lived under the supervision of Christ and Christ’s Spirit. 

Neither Paul nor John are claiming that we can do whatever we want. That would be a very dangerous freedom indeed, then many of our laws are put in place to protect us from our greatest enemy, ourselves and our selfish desires. Instead we are liberated from what holds us back from becoming God’s children and heirs. What both are saying is that we must try and do what God wants, as individuals and as a society. 

Paul was quick to defend himself against any accusations of lawlessness. He knew that we need reliable rules to govern our interactions. In his mission he profited from the rule of law, from a reliable infrastructure, and from his right as a citizen to appeal to Rome when he felt he had been arrested unjustly. But he was also willing to be arrested and punished if laws got in the way of his mission of bringing the Good News of Jesus Christ to as many people as possible.
To be redeemed and liberated from the law means that our acceptance by God is not dependent on us obeying a set of rules about worship and ritual. I want you to come to church every week, and I want you to come to this church every week, and I truly believe that you will benefit from hearing the Word and even more from receiving the Word in the bread and wine made holy at the Lord’s Table. But your relationship with God does not depend on it. Your relationship with God depends solely on you responding in faith to how God has already acted in Christ. 

Both Paul and John tell us that we have received adoption as God’s children, and that we are called to act like God’s children, and that because we are children, “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts,” (Gal. 4:5) a spirit of grace and truth that directs and guides us. Liberated from the law and guided by the Spirit, we have both the freedom and the duty to act primarily as God’s children in our interactions with one another, with the state, and with those in power.
It is a good thing that the State does not run the Church and that the Church does not run the State. Wherever and whenever that has happened, it has not turned out well. Our relationship with the State and with governments will always be both constructive and critical. Our primary allegiance is to our Father, God, not to any particular country or party. 

To be critical means to judge existing and new rules and laws by God’s standards: Are they just? Are they equitable? Are they based on the principle of equality – that all human beings are made in God’s image? Do they reflect God’s preferential option for the poor, the powerless, and the stranger? If not, we need to work to change them or to prevent a change happening. In exceptional circumstances we may even need to disobey them. If I were living in Poland, Hungary, and more recently in Austria, there are rules I would actively oppose, because they are discriminatory and simply un-Christian. Even in Germany some churches break or at least stretch the law to offer Kirchenasyl, church asylum in exceptional cases: Protecting a refugee or a refugee family threatened with deportation back to allow their case to be reexamined. And here in Germany I am definitely very critical of the current regulations that prevent a whole group of refugees, those who have temporary, subsidiary protection because they fled a warzone, from being reunited with their families, without at least taking the individual case into account. I continue to be astonished by the hypocrisy of those who proclaim the value of the family one day, only to deny this to a whole group of people another day. No government can be forced to do what the church says anymore, but equally no government and no politician has the right to stop us saying what we believe God wants for the world. We cannot let darkness overcome the light of Christ.

To be constructive means engaging with and working with those who govern and hold power. Incarnation is about God coming into the world: “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him.” (John 1:10), “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” (John 1:14) We cannot, as some Christians have argued, separate ourselves and try and live in some sort of parallel society. God sent God’s Son to bring light into this world and that very Son, our Lord and Savior, calls on us to testify to that light. Good laws can prevent discrimination and offer restitution for past wrongs. The best way of caring for the poor, the powerless, and the stranger is through society. We need taxes to ensure that wealth is more evenly distributed and to finance the provision of health, education, and social services. In many countries, the Church is a provider of some of these services. 

Coming back to our friend Sylvester, I think we can assume that his motivation for working with the Roman Empire and with Constantine was positive. He hoped for a constructive engagement with the Roman State. Christians were freed from persecution; the Church was able to grow and reach more people. Christian ethical considerations began to influence and change laws and practice, leading to greater respect for the value of human life, for children, women, and slaves. For Pope Sylvester it will have seemed as if the world had finally begun to know Christ and to accept him. 

That is what God wants of us to. That through our testimony and our lives the world gets to know the light that is Christ. That his light and life continue to transform the world. And that we are all liberated from anything that prevents us loving God and our neighbor.
Amen.   

Monday, December 25, 2017

The story goes on




A Sermon preached on 25th December 2017, Christmas Day, at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden
Isaiah 52:7-10, Hebrews 1:1-4, John 1:1-14


The latest Star Wars film has just reached the theatres: The Last Jedi. I haven’t seen it yet, but I will, I’m a fan! This is the eighth main movie in the series. First, we had the three original films ending with the – seeming – triumph of the Force of good. As at that time at least George Lucas felt the original story was complete, so they were not followed by a sequel, but instead by a prequel: 3 new movies explaining what happened before the original story. Where the characters came from, how they became who they were. 

I suppose we could also call the text we heard this morning from the Gospel of John, his prologue, a prequel. It is a prequel to Matthew and Luke’s birth stories because it tells us what happened before the birth in Bethlehem. Who are the characters? Where are they from? What are they here for? 

The story of Jesus did not begin in a manger in a stable in Bethlehem. The story of Jesus begins, John tells us, before time itself! Jesus, called the Word in the prologue, is the instrument of creation, the creative Word. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ….  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” (John 1:1-3) This idea is not unique to John’s Gospel. As we also heard, the author of Hebrews has a similar explanation: God “has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word.” (Hebrews 1:2-3) 

So, Jesus is not simply a human being adopted by God, or someone given a task like a messenger or a prophet. That is the role of the other character introduced in the prologue: “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.” (John 1:6-8) John the Baptist is a human witness who brings a message from God and who points to the light that is God in Jesus. And light, as we know from the Genesis creation story, is the first thing God calls in to being: Let there be light. 

John’s prologue, or prequel, next tells us that this light was coming into the world. God becomes human. This is the Christian answer to the age-old question that Jewish teachers had long grappled: “How can the one true God be both different from the world and active within the world? How can he be remote, holy and detached, and also intimately present?”[1] The idea of God’s Word, already instrumental in the creation story, things are only created when God speaks, and of the character of Wisdom, who we find for example in the Book of Proverbs, were their ways of answering this question. They were the means by which God acted in the world. 

But the Word as we understand it is not some abstract principle, but a real person. “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” (John 1:14) The word for flesh, sarx does mean that – flesh or meat – it also stands for a living creature. And in the Greek original the Word, now a living, breathing human being does not just live among us, but makes his dwelling among us, puts up his tabernacle. The creche we put up at Christmas is one image of that dwelling, as temporary as the tent that God occupies in the Exodus story. In it Jesus is venerated by people from near and far, by poor and rich, by shepherds and kings or wise men, and also by animals – representatives of all creation. They are not just cute figures, they symbolize Jesus’ power and importance, they remind us at all things came into being through him.   

What are they here for? John as we have heard is a witness. His role is to testify to Jesus so that all might believe through him. In his short life, tragically cut short by the jealousy of Herod’s wife and by Herod’s own insecurity, he was certainly successful – multitudes made the hazardous journey through the Judean wilderness to the river Jordan to see and hear and be baptized by him.
What of the Word made flesh? Why did God come into the world in this way?
First, as we have heard, to bring light. Light’s function is to show us the way. Light lights up paths, a light is something we can aim for in darkness. In this sense the light that Jesus brings is the truth about God, God’s desire for us, God’s love for us, God’s longing for reconciliation.

But Jesus does not just talk about God, Jesus reflects God.  When we see Jesus’ glory, we see God’s glory. Jesus’ character, is God’s character. Jesus is described as being full of grace and truth. A phrase that reminds us of the Old Testament descriptions of God as being rich in kindness and fidelity or full of mercy and loving-kindness. We can know God: through the father’s only son.

Finally, Jesus empowers us. “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” (John 1:12) St. Paul uses the term children of God too in his letters, we are children of God through faith in Christ Jesus (Gal. 3:26), and through the power of God’s Spirit within us (Rom. 8:14, 16). And Paul often combines this with the concept of being heirs: “Now if we are children, then we are heirs--heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ.” (Rom. 8:17) So to be children of God is on the one hand an extension of the blessing God had given to Israel to cover all of humanity. No one is excluded from this offer. On the other hand, to be children and heirs, together with God’s only Son, is not something passive. To be an heir encompasses responsibility and a duty. We are empowered with a purpose. 

In the story that John goes on to tell in his Gospel, a story the prologue already hints to, Jesus demonstrates his power again and again in a series of signs, and yet is often rejected: the world did not know him … his own people did not accept him. But many did, and as we also hear in the Gospel were renewed and transformed by the process. Then Jesus is killed, the ultimate rejection, but his light is not overcome by the darkness of death, and his death is not the end of the story. Nor is his resurrection the end of the story, because the story was not and is not over yet. We do not just have a prequel, and a main story, we have innumerable sequels. For every Christian, for everyone who receives Jesus, the Word, the light, this becomes our story, ours to live in the light of God’s word.  What might that be? Here is one version of how the story must go on, in Howard Thurman’s poem “The Work of Christmas[2]

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.
Amen.


[1] Tom Wright: John for Everyone
[2] Howard Thurman, The Mood of Christmas & Other Celebrations