Who Rules?

Romans 3:1-7, Matthew 22:15-22

July 6, 2008

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

On Friday, all across this country and at military bases and among expats throughout the world, an amazing experiment was celebrated. The United States of America. Now I don’t want to join John McCain and Barack Obama in the great contest to see who is the most patriotic American, but I do celebrate the hope that has been this nation from its beginnings. Oh, my eyes are wide open to the way the experiment has failed over the decades, but there is so much about the United States that has always had such promise and has even come through on that promise from time to time. One of those gifts has been that we are a nation that continually seeks to improve upon what the past has been, and to correct past mistakes. Beginning with the creation of a system to amend the central document that governs our life together, the Constitution has been revised to correct the mistakes of the past. Women and people of color were not given the right to vote in the original document, and because we had a process for change, those mistakes made by our much revered founding fathers were righted. When I was a child in the 60’s, I well remember one of the stock phrases of the time, often misused by those who opposed change. The short version went, “America, Right or Wrong.” But the whole phrase actually read, “America, Right or Wrong. When it’s right, keep it right. When it’s wrong, make it right.”

The first amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, that first attempt to “make it right,” begin with trying to deal with one of the stickiest problems of governments in the 18^th and 19^th centuries: what would the place of religion be in the nation? In England, Spain, France and other nations from which the European settlers who controlled power in the new United States came, specific religions were “established,” and that word has a very particular meaning. The “Established” religion of a country was supported by tax dollars and even sometimes the only religion allowed in the nation. In Connecticut and several of the other colonies, specific churches were “established” when the Constitution was written; in Connecticut it was us, our spiritual ancestors in the Congregational churches. Tax money supported the Congregational Churches in most of New England, and other religious groups had to get permission to worship, unsupported by the state and often harassed, as history tells us of Roger Williams in Massachusetts.

Many of the men who wrote the Constitution actually were not church members, or were only nominally on the rolls. The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights was their attempt to do something truly radical at the time in world governments: make sure people of any religion or no religion were not forced to support any specific religion and make sure everyone could worship as they pleased (or not worship as they pleased) without harassment from government officials. This is what they wrote: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” This is what we often talk about as the separation of church and state.

This morning I want to remind us that the first amendment is actually addressed to the state, not to the church, as it is sometimes interpreted. The amendment does not say that the churches shall stay out of the business of the state; it does say that the state shall stay out of the business of churche. In the context of the time, this amendment sought to protect people from the state imposing any specific belief on them, to protect them from having to pay for the support of an organization in which people did not believe, to protect people’s right to gather for worship in any way they chose and to speak in that worship service about anything they chose, without the state punishing them for what they said. Although the clauses in this first amendment having to do with free speech, press, the right to assemble and petition the government have often been separated from the beginning of the amendment having to do with religion, all those clauses also relate to the life of the church: as church folk we are free to speak, to publish our opinions, to assemble for worship or other activities, and to petition the government to “redress grievances,” that is, to change what we think is wrong in our national life.

That last point is particularly important. The first amendment says that the state should not establish any religion as official. It also provides a mechanism for churches and individual Americans to address the government about things they believe to be in need of change, to “redress grievances.” This is actually very Biblical, in addition to being Constitutional, and it runs contrary to movements in Christianity over the centuries that have urged Christians to withdraw from the world as hopelessly sinful and just wait for God to come and remake it. No, from the beginning, God has called people of faith to engage the government under which they live, for God is concerned about how we live now, not just in the deep future.

The three scriptures that were read today come from very different religious and political contexts, different from each other and very different from ours. God’s call to Jeremiah comes in a time when the rulers of Israel, Jeremiah’s country, rulers that were nominally Jewish, in a Jewish nation, were acting in ways counter to God’s hope for a nation that was meant to be a “light to the world.” The apostle Paul was writing to Jewish Christians living in Rome, the capital of a great Empire in which they lived as a minority religious group. They were not, at the time he wrote, facing great persecution from the government, and that’s important to remember when hearing this passage. Jesus spoke to religious leaders who were living under Roman rule but were allowed to exercise their religion fairly freely.

Each of these three passages has a slightly different message about the relationship of the individuals and religious groups involved in terms of their relation with the “state” of their time, a message that has very much to do with that specific context. Jeremiah is to be a fiery prophet who will speak truth to power and do all he can to change the way the rulers of his time ruled. Paul urges the Roman Christians to obey the government, so that they do not face the kind of persecution that their Jewish brothers and sisters, who did rebel, were facing in Palestine. Jesus reminded his questioners that Caesar’s rule was limited in both space and time, so paying taxes was no great matter. The greater matter was that in all their lives, they should give to God all that God required, for God made the earth and the fullness thereof, something Caesar could not claim, even if he did claim divinity.

What all these texts have in common, which I think does apply to us today in our specific context, is the strong belief that there is no separation between the realms of religion and the state, from the point of view of religious people and organizations. Do you hear how that is different from what the First Amendment says? The Bible says that God is the ultimate ruler of all, people and nations, and if God’s concern is all the earth, that is our concern as well. That’s why Paul spoke against those who called Christians to separate themselves from the world. He told the Roman Christians to continue to work within the system and not to flee it for an other-worldly community. That’s why God called Jeremiah to speak up to the rulers of Israel. That’s why Jesus said that it was okay to pay taxes using Roman money, but continued on to remind people that God was involved in all matters of politics and economics in addition to what might be seen as narrowly “religious.”

It is a false dichotomy for a Christian to say that some things in our lives are “religious” and some things are not, and that we have little boxes in our world into which we put the religious things; we call them church buildings, and that everything outside that needs to be free or separate from what is religious. To claim to be a Christian means that in God we live and move and have our beings, all the time, in every context. Those rulers Jeremiah scolded thought that as long as they made a proper sacrifice at the right day at the Temple, then they could do whatever they wanted in their personal and political lives and it didn’t matter. It mattered to God.

It still does. When we eat and drink at this table and become one with Christ, that means all the time. We see our nation, our community, our families, our work with the eyes of Christ and we are called to respond with the voice, hands, feet, and mind of Christ.

I believe deeply that at this time in the continuing experiment of the United States, the churches and church folk need to remember this and not be lulled by those who would say that separation of church and state means the churches and faith leaders should shut up about things that are not “religious,” meaning everything that is not involved in the life of the congregation or individual salvation. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his letter from Birmingham Jail, bemoaned those who “remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows” and who said that there were “social issues with which the gospel has no real concern.” (Testament of Hope, p. 299). Is there anything on earth with which God has no real concern? We may disagree about how God is calling us to act in any given situation, but we must never think God does not care how we act in every part of life. America, right or wrong. When it’s right, keep it right. When it’s wrong….” Amen.