Roger Ray, pastor
Epiphany 1
Psalm 72:1-7, 12-14
1Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to a king's son.
2May he judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice.
3May the mountains yield prosperity for the people, and the hills, in righteousness.
4May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.
5May he live while the sun endures, and as long as the moon, throughout all generations.
6May he be like rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers that water the earth.
7In his days may righteousness flourish and peace abound, until the moon is no more.
12For he delivers the needy when they call, the poor and those who have no helper.
13He has pity on the weak and the needy, and saves the lives of the needy.
14From oppression and violence he redeems their life; and precious is their blood in his sight.
Everyone knows that the most fundamental rule for any social gathering is to avoid talking about either religion or politics. As a pastor, religion professor and a journalist who writes political essays, I'm about as dangerous to a pleasant social gathering as a tsunami at a beach vacation. I don't watch sports and I am often uncertain as to which professional sport is in season but when I am at a loss for words, I often just throw out a, "How about those Bears?" and hope that it hit it lucky.
But the truth of the matter is, at least for me, that there is no way to avoid, not only religion or politics, but more accurately, I always have to have the two together. Though there are certainly those who cry out against any mixture of religion and politics, it is a rather absurd complaint. Almost everything in scripture and serious religious practice has a political implication.
I find that people only cry foul when you are saying something with which they don't personally agree.
No one says that the Catholic Church is meddling in politics when they are publicly opposing abortion, or that the Quakers are political when they are opposed to war or the Baptists are against almost anything that is especially fun to do.
Anyone who reads the prophets and the gospels should not be surprised when we in the progressive movement advocate for peace, protecting the environment and the equal rights of all races, genders and sexual orientations. In fact, specifically because we take the prophets and the gospels seriously, we have fought to lower the interest rates charged by predatory lenders, to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, for poverty related services and access to health care and addiction treatment. That may seem political to people who only want us to pray, baptize and serve communion but those people don't get to tell us what it means to be spiritual people.
There is a common misconception that the involvement of the faith community in politics is something new, a perversion of pure religion. That is, what we call in technical theological language, pure hogwash. Look at this reading we have this morning from Psalm 72. This is an example of what we call an "enthronement psalm," but if you look at it, it is little more that a public prayer for a just and ethical government.
Verse 4 that asks that the ruler of their nation "defend the cause of the poor ...., give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor," that's exactly what we are all about..... and that's 3000 years old!
Jesus and the ancient prophets were not imprisoned and killed because they were extolling people to pray more often, make sacrifices and memorize scripture.
They were imprisoned and killed for exactly the same reasons that Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the Berrigan brothers, Archbishop Romero and Dorothy Day were imprisoned or killed or both. They criticized the government. They opposed military service. They were a threat to the economic system that involved the rich taking advantage of the poor.
Jesus wasn't killed for making claims to be the messiah or for matters of religious doctrine.... they killed him because he was a threat to the established order of government, of banking, of business and the institutional religion that supported government, banking and business.
This is the point where we often find ourselves parting company with the more traditional churches that insist upon a fairly literal reading of the gospels. Reading the gospels in their historical setting helps us to see that the titles the early church heaped up on the executed Jesus were the exact same titles that were traditionally reserved for the Caesar, the emperor of the empire.
The statues, banners, even their coins referenced the Caesar as either god incarnate or the son of God. They called their emperors "lord" and even "savior." You were told in Sunday School when you were a child that "Christ" was not Jesus' last name.... "Christ" means "king" and yet our Sunday School teachers rarely put 2 and 2 together to let us know what that meant.
Imagine what it would mean if we put on our sign out front, not "Dr. Roger Ray, pastor" but rather, "Roger Ray, the President of the United States." That has a rather more ominous ring to it doesn't it?
The cry of the early church, "Jesus is Lord!" was a defiant proclamation that the Caesar was not the lord. To call Jesus "the Christ" meant that Caesar was not the king. I doubt seriously that during his lifetime anyone called Jesus "Christ" or "Lord" or "Savior" and certainly no one called him "son of God," but right after the government had him executed the people who were still gathered around his message saw the stark contrast between the message of Jesus and the domination of Rome and by the time Paul started writing letters to churches fifteen years after the first Easter, it was already common anti-empire language within the church to say that Jesus was God's son, the savior, the Christ and our Lord.
With good reason there are many among progressive religious folks who don't like using any of those titles because they are so closely associated with the domination of empire and, when you think about it, they are mostly pretty strongly male dominant as well. I find myself avoiding these titles most of the time because I don't want to be misunderstood but when I do use a word like "lord" in reference to God or to Jesus, I want you to understand that I am saying that the message of Jesus is what I prize, not any king, emperor, president or employer. When we say that Jesus is lord what we are saying is that the economic and political powers of this world do not own us.... they are not our lords because we have a given our allegiance to the message of Jesus of Nazareth.
The anti-empire implications of those titles were not lost on Paul. He was a citizen of Rome and was willing to exploit his citizenship in the Empire for his missionary purposes but there is no credible way that he could have been unaware that the language he used was revolutionary.
Still, Paul started a process of shifting attention away from the cry for mercy for the oppressed, relief for the poor, justice for the downtrodden and towards a hope that was more invested in a kingdom that was to come in heaven than the kingdom where we have a street address, businesses, schools, slums and leper colonies.
There is no shortage of books that detail the differences between the religion of Paul and the teachings of Jesus. I believe that there was a world of difference between the two but that wades into a lot of historical speculation because even our canonical gospels were written long after Paul's letters were commonly read and Paul had more influence on the final shape of those gospels than, frankly, he really should have.
That's a value judgment on my part though I don't say that to drive an unnecessary wedge between progressive Christians and traditional Christians. The final redaction of New Testament materials and the selection process of what to leave in and what to take out was influenced by the agenda of the empire.
I am convinced that the Jesus movement was distinctly anti-empire, was fully invested in advocacy for the poor and was a message of radical compassion. Paul expressed those values within a more theologically contrived structure that unfortunately played into the hands of the interests of Constantine and his successors. The faith that started by being a thorn in the side of the empire was transformed into being the tip of the spear of the empire's exploitation of the poor. Frankly, I believe that every reform movement in the history of Christianity has to one degree or another, been an attempt to take Jesus back from the empire and give him back his message of radical compassion, liberation and hope.
For me, turning Jesus into a god and worshipping him takes away most of the relevance and power of his message. Thankfully, there are those who have a very high christology who are joining us in our prayers that the government will defend the weak, heal the sick, feed the hungry, provide for, as the psalmist says, "prosperity for the people and defense from violence and oppression."
We have sometimes been known to be dismissive of traditional religious people because they are too emphatic about Jesus being the lord of heaven and they have been dismissive of us because we are so emphatic about the message of Jesus being the lord of the earth. The gospels insist that God is lord of both heaven and earth so, perhaps, in this case, we both get to be right.
I don't know much about heaven but I've gotten a pretty good taste of the earth. I've seen children making rugs in wretched circumstances in Egypt. I've seen old people worked so hard in Ecuador that their skeletons are bent and their bare feet look like the feet of an elephant. I've been in many villages in Nicaragua where some children are blind from malnutrition and where many have died.
I know people who live in their cars in Springfield. We regularly feed children who live below the radar of child protective services and school truant officers. And so, I think it is only right that we take up the prayers of our ancestors in the faith so that we also pray that our government will judge the poor with justice and work for prosperity among the people. That our government will defend the cause of the poor, give deliverance to the needy and crush the oppressors..... and if they don't, they will have reason to imprison and kill a few more prophets because we intend to do more than pray.
