Sermon -- Christ and the New Politics (Psalm 118:14-29)

¹⁴The Lord is my strength and my might; he has become my salvation.
¹⁵There are glad songs of victory in the tents of the righteous: “The right hand of the Lord does valiantly;
¹⁶the right hand of the Lord is exalted; the right hand of the Lord does valiantly.”
¹⁷I shall not die, but I shall live, and recount the deeds of the Lord.
¹⁸The Lord has punished me severely, but he did not give me over to death.
¹⁹ Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them and give thanks to the Lord.
²⁰This is the gate of the Lord; the righteous shall enter through it.
²¹I thank you that you have answered me and have become my salvation.
²²The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.
²³This is the Lord's doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.
²⁴This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.
²⁵Save us, we beseech you, O Lord! O Lord, we beseech you, give us success!
²⁶Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord. We bless you from the house of the Lord.
²⁷The Lord is God, and he has given us light. Bind the festal procession with branches, up to the horns of the altar.
²⁸You are my God, and I will give thanks to you; you are my God, I will extol you.
²⁹O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever.

(Psalm 118:14-29, NRSV)

For the last many weeks HBO has shown a series called “Rome” that depicts the fall of the Roman Republic in the generation before the birth of Christ. I have not seen the series, but I know that it has been referred to as “toga-ripper,” so I can only imagine that it highlighted the sex and violence in the story. But beyond that, the story of the collapse of the republic following the assassination of Julius Caesar has always fascinated Americans.

The generation of our Founding Fathers identified with the leaders and defenders of the republic. George Washington likened himself to the Roman general Fabius, who defeated Hannibal by a strategy of gradualism in which he avoided standing battles. Washington also greatly admired Cincinnatus who, after leading the defense of Rome, hung up his sword and returned to his plow. The first generation of Americans imagined themselves to be building a new Roman Republic. And our capital city, which employed Romanesque architecture, was imagined to be Rome on the Potomac. Even in the 20^th century we kept up the tradition, building Romanesque temples to our secular gods: the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials.

The Roman Republic fell, historians tell us, because its leaders lost the simple martial virtues of the citizens of a republic. As they became wealthy, they also became decadent. Their moral decadence eventually resulted in the collapse of the Roman Empire as well some four centuries later.

Our Founding Fathers believed that republican governments were the hardest to maintain because they are based on the virtue of their citizens. When citizens become self-indulgent, when they become too interested in their own pleasures, then collapse is inevitable. Our Founding Fathers feared for our future on this score, and I think many modern Americans do, too. In part this is what is behind some of our national discussion this week about the coarsening of the culture through the racist and misogynistic language heard on shock radio and in hip-hop music.

Taking a very long view of history, prophets such as Daniel and Christian theologians such as Augustine noted the rise and fall of empires as inevitable.

Jesus' attitude toward political power in his day seems to have been one of mild contempt. He compared Solomon's glory unfavorably to the lilies of the field. He referred to Herod as “that fox” — not the clever animal that we associate with Aesop's fables, but a contemptible creature that kills chickens in the night. And when Jesus and Pilate met, they had very little to say to each other. Jesus had no apparent political agenda at all. When the crowd at Nazareth tried to proclaim Him king, He simply slipped away. It was His way of saying, “If nominated I will not run, if elected I will not serve.”

Yet Jesus was not in any way a political rebel. When questioned about paying the hated Roman tax, He said to give Caesar his due — as though to say that He had bigger fish to fry and couldn't be bothered about such a trivial matter. He told the poor that they were blessed, but He did not call upon them to overthrow their oppressors. While the Zealots were plotting armed rebellion, Jesus said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

Psalm 118

How did such a non-political person have such a run-in with the powers that be? Jesus got into trouble when he raised false political expectations by allowing himself to be considered the Messiah. The Jewish people naturally believed that the coming messiah would be a political animal. God, after all, had always dealt with Israel as a nation; he had also judged the people because of their political leaders; and by the simplest literal reading of the Old Testament, the messiah was to be a political liberator.

The defining moment in Israel's history was the Passover — the moment when God directly intervened for Israel and against Egypt in order to liberate his people. He led them out of the house of bondage by decisive acts that led to a political decision on Pharaoh's part to let the people go. And God forever afterwards would be known to Israel as the God who liberated them, who delivered them from their oppressors. He introduced the Ten Commandments by identifying himself as “the Lord your God who brought you out of the Egypt, out of the land of slavery” (Exodus 20:2).

On Jesus' last night on earth, he celebrated the Passover feast; and he probably sang with his disciples Psalm 118, which we read this morning. Psalm 118 has been interpreted in many ways: it refers to the Passover events; it refers to the victory of one of Israel's kings over the surrounding nations; it refers to the return of the Jewish exiles from Babylonian captivity. For the Jews' of Christ's day it was a Messianic Psalm that hailed the coming of the Messiah into Jerusalem, and so it was used on Psalm Sunday: “Hosanna in the highest, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” For early Christians it is the song of Christ himself who is thanking God for his victory over his enemies. In fact, the Psalm is so elastic it can be stretched to cover just about any interpretation. But in every case the victorious one is thanking and praising God for his deliverance from enemies.

The argument of the Psalm goes something like this: It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes, says the Psalmist. The nations surrounded me, but God gave me the victory. “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” (Psalm 118:22). In other words, the surrounding nations have rejected Israel and its king, but God has made the nation and the king of crucial importance. Israel and the king had gained a great victory, “The Lord has done this and it is marvelous in our eyes. This is the day that the Lord has made” (This is the victory that the Lord has given us) -- “Let us rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118:23-24). Later the Jews would interpret the triumphant king as the messiah.

The Kingdom of God

In view of this messianic Psalm, with all of its references to the world of politics and nations, wars and victories, can we blame the ancient Jews for not recognizing Jesus as the Messiah? He just didn't fit.

Jesus, however, did use an expression that must have been misunderstood as a political slogan: the Kingdom of God. We hear it repeated throughout the Gospels. In fact in Mark's gospel it is the first thing that Jesus says: “The time has come. The Kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15). For the Jews, the Kingdom of God meant the liberation of Israel and the establishment of their nation as the “cornerstone” of the world. It was to be a visible, powerful kingdom of this world — one which would dominate the world.

But for Jesus the kingdom of God was the kingdom within — the kingdom of the heart. It was not visible; it was invisible. It was not going to come about dramatically, like the arrival of an army terrible with banners; it would come like seed sown in a field, it would grow slowly and among the weeds; it was like the mustard seed, so small that you wouldn't see it on the ground, yet it would eventually become a small tree in which the birds could make their nests. It would not come about through armed conquest, but by the conquest of individual people, one at a time, through love and persuasion and example.

Yet Christians following Jesus have not always understood the nature of his kingdom. They have wanted a visible kingdom, and they have been willing to use the coercive powers of this world to achieve it. During a period of two hundred years Crusaders stormed castles, pillaged cities, held fortresses — all the while sincerely believing that they were doing God's will. The Conquistadores attempted to enslave and then convert Native Americans. Christian explorers as late as the 19th century were complicit in the African slave trade. Through much of the Middle Ages and early modern period the church used the Inquisition to quell opposing views. And, lest we Reformed Protestants become too pound, we should remember that there have been times when we too have attempted to use the tools of the state to impose the kingdom of God on the world. Think of John Calvin's Geneva, Oliver Cromwell's England, and John Winthrop's Massachusetts.

All of which bring us now to our own time. Many Christians today are spending an enormous amount of time and energy and money on attempting to use political means to change the kingdoms of this world. To some extent this is appropriate, especially in a democracy in which we all have the right as well as the responsibility to address the moral and social issues that confront us. But we need to be very wary of putting too much of our efforts into affecting the kingdoms of this world rather than attempting to introduce them to an entirely different kind of kingdom — the kingdom of God.

Christianity seems to be at its best when Christians are a minority and when we are faithful to ourselves. Our stock in the world always seems to go down when we are overly engaged in the world's business and doing it in the world's way.

It's very sad when you ask secular persons today what they think about Christianity, and the response you get is that we are identified with certain political views regarding family values, or homosexual rights, or abortion. As important as these issues are — and they are very important — they are peripheral to the main issue : the kingdom of God breaking into the world.

We have been assaulted recently by a group called the Neo-Atheists. This is a group that is militantly anti-Christian. Their best known writers are Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. They repeat many of the tired old arguments against theism. But what is new — at least to me — is that Harris and others seriously argue that Christians are somehow a threat to the world because, so they maintain, being certain about the next life breeds intolerance in this life. In an age of Islamic-inspired terrorism and Fundamentalist Christian influence on American politics, this argument may seem plausible to many. But except for a few on the fringes, I don't see how anything could be further from the truth. I don't see how it could be further from the spirit of Christ.

The Kingdom Way

When Jesus was asked by Pilate if he was king of the Jews, he replied, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place.” In other words Jesus would present no physical threat at all to the powers that be. That's not to say that he wasn't a threat. But the threat would be moral and spiritual. He refused to operate by the usual rules of the game. The early Christians, who at their height before Constantine were never more than ten percent of the Roman population, understood how the Kingdom of God was to enter the world and to conquer it.

Will Durant, author of The Story of Civilization, wrote:

There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned and oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won.

But having said this, I must also say that we need to distinguish between the Kingdom of God that is within and the Kingdom of God that is to come. We are surely citizens of God's invisible kingdom, but that kingdom will not always be invisible. Some day it will be visible. We pray every week that it will come: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Until that day of the visible kingdom, the invisible kingdom within will grow, and it will spread. And we are seeing that happen today as never before. God's kingdom is growing in places that even a generation ago seemed to many to be forlorn hopes: Eastern Europe, Russia, and China. And it's spreading like wildfire in Latin America and Africa. And even in some predominately Muslim countries, we are seeing a strong Christian movement: Sudan, Nigeria and the frontier areas of Pakistan.

Conclusion

In Psalm 118 we encounter a psalmist who is praising God for a great deliverance. The deliverance is open to interpretation, but surely the supreme meaning must be about Jesus who was, in a sense, delivered from his enemies and then became the stone that the builders rejected, the cornerstone of the new edifice that God is building in the world — the Kingdom of God.

God is building it one stone at a time — that is, one person at a time. Politics has its role to play, but it is subordinate and should not interfere with the general strategy of winning people to Christ, one by one. This is frustrating because it runs counter to our instincts, and to the way the world usually works. But that is the point: the Kingdom of God does not work according to the usual earthly rules. As the prophet Zechariah put it, “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD Almighty” (Zechariah 4:6).

Christians in the United States are facing the unknown. We are going to have to get use to being a minority religion. This will be new for us. Christians in the States have always either had a majority of the citizenry or been nominally approved by the majority of the people in the country. If all the statistical trends hold true, this will no longer be the case in the next generation — if it is even the case now. And where before we enjoyed nominal approval, we may very well have to learn to confront a measure of disapproval and even scorn.

Ironically, this may be one of the best things that could happen to us. As we become again like the minority church of first-century Rome, we may also recover a spiritual commitment that we haven't known in generations. We may also recover the strategy for advancing the Kingdom of God that Jesus intended all along. If the United States becomes increasingly like the decadent Roman Empire in its last days, we Christians will need to be increasing like the Christians that Will Durant described. We will have to stand aside from — and even against — the Roman decadence of our time. And we will have to win people to his kingdom by a different kind of politics than what the world is used to. It is a politics that wins, not by coercion, not by apparent strength, not because of any favor to be gained by being seen to be Christian, certainly not by espousing a political agenda, and not by imposing our views on anyone. God in Christ is calling us to win people by a quiet moral and spiritual strength that is alien to the kingdoms and standards of the world. He is calling us to win people over by living up to our own high standards. And he is calling us to win the world over by modeling authentic, uncompromised, vibrant Christian lives. And in this world, that alone will make us stand out.

In the language of Psalm 118, we are called today to be the stone that the builders rejected — the oddballs, the misfits, the radicals who march to the beat of a very different drummer. It's not easy, but it's God's essential strategy for winning the world over. And it begins — amid all the moral and spiritual chaos of our times — with each one of us as individuals trying to live lives faithful to the Lord. In doing that we will find our deliverance and we will find the Lord in our midst.

The foregoing sermon was given by Rev. Michael Parker on April 15, 2007.