This sermon was delivered and surprisingly well received
July 3, 2022 at the Batchelerville (Northville) Presbyterian Church in Edinburg NY.
The texts were Galatians 5:1, 13-15 and Luke 10:1-11.
Please stand and say:
"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America,
and to the republic for which it stands,
one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
I have never led the pledge in a worship service before
or ever thought that I would do so.
I have always opposed having flags in churches,
because I believe, both as an American and a Christian,
in total separation of church and state.
But today's sermon is about patriotism and freedom and our communion.
More than ever, we need to love our country.
The apostle Paul taught us that the gospel of Jesus is about freedom and justice,
which ties the pledge to our Christian faith.
The pledge was written by a socialist Baptist minister to affirm what had been won in the Civil War:
a single, undivided nation, with equality for all.
The words "under God" were promoted by a Presbyterian minister, who, I think,
made a terrible mistake.
The pledge to the flag, said together by gatherings of diverse people,
proclaims that we love our country
because it is one, with liberty and justice for all.
And at the same time the pledge proclaims
that our love of country is conditional,
only so long as it is one, with liberty and justice for all
We owe no allegiance to an America that is not about freedom and justice.
------------
Eight years ago I began writing a memoir, and it is finally published.
It is Blue Neon Cross: A Personal History of the Church in the Modern World.
Writing helps me to think and I used to think
I knew what the church and our country were about.
Writing this book was an examination into what I didn't know.
When I thought about the context of my life,
I realized that we had always thought
we were on the way to solving the problems of racism.
We had a Civil War over slavery and the outcome was
that we would remain a single nation where all are free.
But events in recent years show that the Civil War continues and is not over.
As the southern writer, Faulkner, said:“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
We now see that our current disputes and conflicts among parties and groups
have their roots in the very beginnings of our country.
In 1619 slaves were first brought here from Africa.
Slavery, inequality of income and wealth and limitations of opportunity
are baked into our Constitution.
States rights, what government can and cannot do, who can decide,
whether the rich and powerful will rule,
and whether slavery would be allowed:
These things are in our Constitution.
Somehow we forgot or ignored the racial warfare, the lynchings,
the destruction of whole Black towns in the south, the riots in our cities
that have been a part of our national history
for more than two centuries.
We forget the labor strife of the 1880's through the Depression,
the attacks on Hispanics and Asians through all this history;
the mass deportations of Latinos
and the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during WWII.
We forget the attacks on women who wanted to vote
and on those who wanted the right to choose not to have a child.
We forget the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma
by domestic terrorists,
and many want us to forget the assault on the Capitol building Jan. 6, 2021.
We don't think about them because we always thought
we were gradually creating "a more perfect union,"
putting hatred and violence farther behind us.
And in the churches, we thought that believing in Jesus would save us.
It was all about personal salvation from personal sins,
which no one could avoid, but believing fixed it.
You didn't even have to pay much attention to Jesus' teachings,
because all you had to do was believe.
But we thought that we must believe certain things about Jesus and God.
We thought there was one religion (Christianity)
and one Church (our own denomination);
We thought we possessed the truth and pretended that the truth possessed us.
But that Church and those beliefs have turned out to be false,
an illusion, a delusion.
The old faith had been proved false by the development and use of
the atom bomb and by the holocaust, but we didn't want to admit it.
We can now see postwar life, the advertising age, the military-industrial
complex, the corporatism, the commodification of everything,
the consumerism – all of it was and is a bubble,
which now threatens whole societies, nations, and the planet.
----------
So I asked myself, with the church collapsing, what is worth keeping?
I now think that there are three essentials of Christian faith.
The first is Jesus’ teaching, especially of the Kingdom of God.
Kingdom was the same word as Empire, so the kingdom of God is God's Empire.
So Jesus in all of his teaching was illustrating a different kind of Empire
than Rome’s.
The Romans would not have liked an opposing empire.
He was brutally killed for preaching that God was above Rome,
that God’s Empire or kingdom was greater,
that justice was superior to victory, the highest value of Rome.
The message in Jesus’ teachings and the deep meaning of his life and death
is political in nature.
The second essential is the cross, a powerful symbol in 4 ways:
It was the means of execution by which Jesus and countless others
were tortured to death by the power of Rome.
It is the way Jesus died; an historical event.
It represents the suffering of the innocent,
guilty only of opposing the obscene, tyrannical rule of the Roman Empire.
Jesus died innocent of any real crime; he died of a political execution.
The cross is the symbol for the ultimate integrity of Jesus.
Jesus died without violating the principles which he taught.
So he lived and died non-violently protesting the ways of Rome.
And the cross is a symbol for all the suffering of the world,
endured by all humans, because we live this life in this world,
where people who seek wealth and power
kill those who are in their way.
Just about everything else you may have heard or thought about the cross
is probably tacked-on to the truth, elaborately created to make
the simple story of Jesus’ death from Rome’s cruelty
mean something else,
to serve the agenda of the teller of that tale.
The cross isn’t about sacrifice,
or paying a debt to God who is offended by our sins.
To teach that only gives power and authority to the institution of the church,
and its priests and ministers, which is what they always wanted.
The cross was not glorious, never was and never will be.
The ultimate contradiction and irony is a cross
made of ivory, silver, and gold, maybe encrusted with jewels.
Or garish in neon, like something in Las Vegas.
The third essential thing in Christian faith:
the communion table, our communion around it and our community.
Christian faith is not first of all about you or me individually, or our comfort.
Our faith is about community.
Community always involves politics.
Many people say they hate politics
but what they really hate is the lies that lead to corruption
and the misuse of politics for someone’s personal gain.
The essence of politics is our deciding together
how we should improve our lives, what goals and priorities we should set,
and how we should attain them.
Very necessary stuff in our life together.
When we eat this sacramental meal together
and when the symbols of communion work,
our eyes are opened to see and our ears to hear Jesus more clearly.
When we are gathered around the table,
we are drawn under the influence of Jesus.
We put ourselves in a similar relation to him
as had the first disciples who ate and drank with him.
The words of his teachings, the stories of his suffering and death,
the promises of the fullness of life,
are given texture and flavor.
If and when the supper transforms us, we can see God in each other,
in the world, and in the lives of people of other cultures and colors.
Then we can enjoy each other as we do God’s work
of healing and restoring the world.
If there is no community around the table,
if there is no exchange of ideas and affections; it cannot work.
But for you who live together as this congregation,
community as sharing each other’s lives is possible.
Jesus’ idea of church was no more complicated than
a table and benches, with bread and wine on the table.
This describes a good church supper. Amen.
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