“O Where Are Kings and Empires Now?”

2 Samuel 23:1-7, John 18:33-38

November 26, 2006

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

As I told the children, today churches around the world of many traditions celebrate what is called Christ the King or Reign of Christ Sunday. It’s the last Sunday before Advent begins, a day when we reflect on who that baby in the manger grew up to be: the one who was crucified and is risen and reigns in the lives of those who recognize that reign, and in the life of the greater world as well.

But this image of “king” is a problematic one in so many ways for so many people. We don’t live in a country with a king or queen, so most Americans’ image of royalty is England where being a royal means wearing fancy jewels and riding in carriages and, if a recent film about the current queen is to be believed, being out of touch with the reality in which most of her people live. Then there’s an old Monty Python sketch that appears in the film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” in which a peasant identifies a man as the king. When his friend asks how he knows that’s who it is, the peasant says that the man is not covered in manure. The implication being, in the imagined medieval setting of the film, that everyone else is covered in dirt, so anyone who’s clean must be king. If we think of actual history and not movies, often our images of kings and queens are those who are corrupt, morally, politically, economically, you name it. They were quick to use violence, on their people and on their own families, and the size of their armies showed the scope of their power.

That was certainly true of Jesus’ time as well. The kings we read about in the Bible sometimes have their moments, but between insane Saul and philandering David and Herod cutting off the head of John the Baptist, they don’t come off all that well. If David was right in his last words, that one who rules over people justly is like the light of the morning, then things must have been pretty much in twilight throughout the history of Israel. Even though we don’t have rulers called kings and queens, many of those negatives have applied to American rulers throughout our history as well.

Given that reality, then and now, we can only hear Pilate’s question to Jesus, “Are you a king?” as a joke. Jesus spent most of his ministry not above the muck of the world, but right down in it. He didn’t have the fancy stuff that went with being king or the political power or the armies to enforce that power. Pilate knew this. Jesus knew it, too. So his response to Pilate was that he did not claim the title of King in the earthly definition of that role at all, but that he came to the world to testify to the truth. HMMMMM. Kings, or political rulers in general……..truth. Rulers…….truth. Hence the problem many of us have with identifying Jesus with what is a secular, political role. The tradition of the church has been to identify Jesus with the just Ruler that David talks about in his last words, to say that Jesus takes the concept of King or Ruler into the realm where it belongs and out of the world of corruption, armed force and wealth. Jesus becomes the kind of Ruler we all hope could appear on the earth but we all despair of ever seeing. And there’s something to that.

But what really struck me this week as I have thought on this text is Jesus’ response to Pilate. “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.” Jesus seems to claim rule in another realm (not this world), but he defines his role on earth as one who testifies to the truth.

For me, this really helps define something that churches have struggled with from the time of Constantine, when Christianity became the “official” religion of the Roman Empire: what is the proper relationship between the individual Christian or the Church and the realm of politics?

In the recent history of the United States, this question is connected with much emotion, with much danger and with much money, and with this fuzzy concept often called the “separation of church and state.” (not a phrase, by the way, that appears either in the Constitution or the Bible) Those people and groups often identified as the Christian “right” have become deeply involved in politics openly at least since the time of Ronald Reagan. Charismatic preachers have urged people to be politically active on a range of social issues, church mailing lists were solicited by the Republican party in the last two Presidential elections and used to seek contributions and volunteers. Christian evangelical activists have been supported by church and para-church organizations to run for local offices such as school boards in order to influence local issues. Presidents of both major parties have regularly used religious rhetoric to try to convince voters that they are on the “righteous” side of issues that are seen to have religious implications: abortion, homosexuality, stem cell research, the death penalty, etc.

But lest you think this is a tirade against the Republican party’s abuse of religion, I am seeing a disturbing trend among Democrats as well. I have enormous respect for Jim Wallis of the Sojourner’s organization, but it really scares me to see a book called “God’s Politics” and to have seen a display of fliers at Conference Annual Meeting with the title “voting God’s politics” put out by the Christian left. I am concerned when Democratic strategists debate about how they can sculpt advertising in order to capture the vote of the religious left and maybe convince the religious right that they can be on their side, too. A number of pundits after this last election noted that the victories of several candidates for Congress or Senate who were vocally more religiously conservative on social issues like abortion yet were Democrats shows the party reaching out to that population.

I have been a very politically active person throughout my life, on a whole variety of issues, some of which I have talked about over the years from the pulpit, and I think individual Christians and the church have a responsibility to bring their faith to political decisions and actions, just as the Bible is full of the interaction between faith and politics. But I am not so arrogant as to claim that I know what “God’s Politics” would be. And I am ever mindful of the fact that, in the words of the preacher Barbara Brown Taylor, “Jesus was not brought down by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion, which is always a deadly mix.” As I have struggled over my life to discern just what the place of the church in the political realm should be, I keep coming back to this text we read each year on this Sunday celebrating Jesus’ rule. “I have come into the world to testify to the truth.”

That is what I think the political role of the individual Christian and of the church must be. To testify to the truth as we discern it. To speak to those in the political realm about the truth as we see it, even if that truth is difficult for them to hear, perhaps especially if it is difficult to hear. I don’t think it is our role to ally ourselves with one political party or movement or another, but to be those who constantly lift up the truth, which is what made Jesus so annoying to the religious and political leaders of his time and ultimately what got him killed.

Of course the burr in the saddle here is that we can argue together about what the truth is, because, like Pilate, we are human beings who see through a shadowed glass and not with the clarity of the Christ. Given that, we must work harder to listen for God and to discern truth in the great issues and small issues of our communities, nation and world, and, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, not to assume God is on our side, but to try to get ourselves on God’s side.

I think the best example of this I have seen in many years is happening now with reference to the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. The truth in this matter is pretty clear, and people from all political persuasions are pretty much in agreement on it. Our own government has called the killings of Black Africans by their Arab brothers and sisters genocide. The international community speaks with a pretty united voice on this. All those who remember the Holocaust in Germany or the Killing Fields of Cambodia or the massacres in Rwanda keep saying, “never again.” Yet the killings continue.

A large and growing number of Christians have taken it as their task to keep telling the truth about what is happening and holding our political leaders to account for what they are or are not doing to try to stop this. Politicians could debate what is the best plan for Darfur, but too often that debate is not happening and half-measures are instituted that everyone involved knows are meaningless, but they pat themselves on the back that they have done something. In reality, neither our national leaders nor the UN have used all the power and influence at their disposal to stop the genocide in which at least 200,000 people, often women and children, have been killed and hundreds of thousands of women raped and over 2 million people displaced from their homes in dangerous refugee camps.

There are numerous Christian organizations, including the United Church of Christ, who see their role as being those who keep speaking the truth to those in power so as not to let this matter go away. The relationship of church to state in this matter is for the church to remind the state and its leaders that justice is the measure of a ruler and not wealth or armies or vote counts. The relationship of church to state in this matter, as in so many others, is to be the relentless speaker of truth, annoying the powerful in the same way our Ruler Jesus did. What would Jesus do? Insist on politicians hearing the truth.

Perhaps it is the great non-Christian, Gandhi, who needs to remind us of Jesus’ call to us here. “Even if I am a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.” May God give us each and all the wisdom to discern the truth and the courage to speak it, at home, at school, at the town hall or the halls of Congress, acting in the image of our ultimate ruler, the one who came into the world to disturb us with the truth. Amen.