Citizen Christian III: Gospel Truth

As a Southerner, church is expected. Synagogue or mosque is of course an acceptable substitute, and my hometown of Memphis has a vibrant and robust Jewish and Muslim community. ‘Where one goes to church’ is an introductory question, and even those who don’t really claim any faith often have an answer ready for that query.

But we still have the same separations along the wide spectrum of faith traditions that you’ll find in any American city. The left leaning Houses of Worship communicate, the right leaning ones collaborate, but little common interaction happens. So we grow up in silos as tight as any country church in many ways. 

As a teenager, I broke into some of the conservative christian communities when I was ‘outed’ as a Christian. I think act I fascinated the conservative church goers I knew, because I was a theatre person and known to be political. They started asking me questions and inviting me to things but it didn’t quite go as they’d planned. I got kicked out of a bible study (a great story I’ll tell another time), was asked not to return to a church that hosted monthly lock-ins, and occasionally got into shouting matches with friends in the halls.

The biggest distinctions and the thing that seemed to truly raise their ire, was some iteration of this conversation:

Them: But that sounds like a social justice Gospel.

Me: I don’t know any other kind of Gospel.

Them: We are saved by grace, not works.

Me: Faith without works is dead.

Them: People have to believe in Jesus.

Me: If they don’t do what he said to do, why bother?

In many ways, I dove into theological education in order to be better equipped for those conversations. But I now realize what an opportunity I missed timing wise! This was the 1980s, and I was receiving fruits from the first wave of our modern christian political complex. Little did I know then that the term “Social Justice Gospel” was coined by a Baptist theologian over 100 years ago. It isn’t new, leftie, or radical -it’s just the Gospel and it’s solid Christian tradition. Who knows how much of that tenuous ground I could have shaken up, kept from setting, if I’d just realized I was seeing glimpses of a coordinated, strategic attack on Gospel Truth.

Maybe ‘Gospel Truth’ isn’t a commonly used phrase in your life, but I grew up in the American South. Faith-based language permeates everything, and swearing something is the gospel truth is a promise of truth-telling. Unless said with a wink and a “Bless their hearts” and then you know there’s no truth anywhere ‘round at all. And so culturally, the meaning of Gospel Truth is fungible, movable.

Elected officials swear oaths of office most typically on a bible, as most elected officials claim to be Christians, but any text sacred to you is acceptable, which is interesting in and of itself. What exactly is being vowed here? The words spoken have to do with upholding the jurisdictional Constitution or Charter, and being accountable to constituencies. But there are never explicit moral or religious promises made. So why swear on a bible?

I grew up in the 1970’s when we all still said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning to start school. By the 1980’s, this had been replaced by a moment of silence, an interesting swap of patriotic vow for pseudo-prayer time. I didn’t learn about the addition in the 1950’s of references to God not only there but on our money until I went to college.

It also took time to learn more in-depth church history, and to discover the ways in which Christianity moved from an anti-Empire movement to becoming the moral voice of the secular powers, the frequent provider of the rationale for colonial expansion. 

Many years ago, I decided to stand but remain silent during any Pledge of Allegiance or singing of the national anthem as my own response to a growing discontent. At first, I would say the Pledge but omit the “under God” line, but that did not satisfy me. Eventually, I adopted the choice to remain silent, but then Colin Kaepernick modeled a new way of resistance. His actions and the vitriol that followed led me to think again about my relationship with vows. About what it means to swear on something sacred.

Where I’ve landed for now is no more vows. I’ve made marriage vows and ordination vows and upholding those is a lifelong journey. I think we need to step back more often, and consider what it means to align ourselves, swear something’s true, vow an allegiance, or adhere to a theory. We need more critical thinking. More prayer. More humility. And more integrity to what we say we believe and hold sacred.

Heresy of a Christian Nation 2020

July 4, 2020

We’ve recently passed the sixth anniversary of the Hobby Lobby decision, which has evolved as having marked anti-worker and anti-rights effects. It has codified as acceptable a deeply perverted stance of holding morality and purity thresholds as barriers to full employment benefits and healthcare. This is the sermon I preached immediately after the decision was announced in June of 2014. Because this was a preached sermon, the post is a little bit longer than usual.

From Citizen Christian: A Book of Sermons (2016), a collection of sermons I’d preached over the previous decade.

The Heresy of a Christian Nation

Original delivery: July 6, 2014, at First Baptist Church of Denver

Opening note: A few days before this Fourth of July holiday weekend, the U.S. Supreme Court released its decision that Hobby Lobby had a right to deny insurance coverage for certain types of medical care to its employees based on religious grounds. “Closely-held corporations” would be given the right to deny certain benefits to particular employees. This decision changed our legal landscape on many levels, and I am not a lawyer. But it also changed the moral landscape, and that very much is my realm.

The notion that America is a Christian nation is a bad historical interpretation of the facts of our country’s founding. The idea itself is unconstitutional; it also doesn’t hold up to biblical or theological scrutiny. I don’t know why Paul’s jeremiad against a dependence on the Law isn’t heeded by more Paul-quoting Christians.

The heresy of a Christian Nation stands against the Gospel of Jesus, and its message of liberation. I imagine here what an epistle to America could sound like now. This must be include allegiance to a different Kingdom, the Kingdom of God.

Romans 7:13-25 (The Message)

I tend to surprise people with my love for Paul. Paul is often misunderstood in who he was and what he was saying.  Many churches seem to give their interpretations of Paul the weight of the Gospel. Sometimes I wonder whether these folks are following Christ or Paul, a question that would horrify Paul himself.

One of the things I love about Paul is how willing he is to let his humanity show. His letters are often full of confusion, pain, and struggle. Shortly after the passage we just heard in Romans, Paul encourages us with the knowledge that God’s Spirit dwells within us. But Paul also talks openly about our inner sin, our human capacity for evil and apathy, anger and judgment, as he does here. And through it all, Paul reminds us to lean on one another as we learn to turn toward God, as we are continually remade as Christians.

It’s easy to assume that Paul is talking to the individual Christian. So much of it sounds personal. I do this all of the time, taking guidance and inspiration from Paul’s words personally. 

But nearly always, and certainly here, Paul is talking to communities, to the new church, to small groups struggling with how to live as a newly made people. The letter he wrote to the new Christians in Rome is different from his other letters because this was not a community he had founded, visited, or knew well at all. Some scholars surmise, in fact, that Romans is the most ‘essay-esque’ of the Pauline books, the least personal and most corporate.*1

Paul is speaking to a mixed community of new Christians. Some are Jews, some Gentiles, some Hebrew, some Greek, and always there is the foreign Other, as you find in any major city. And even 2,000 years ago, Rome was a significant urban space. 

So out of these disparate backgrounds, what has bound them together as Romans? The law. Who you were as a Roman citizen, or as a resident alien, was codified, laid out, known, and understood. Jews, and still some Jewish Christians, had their own religious laws, but if they were Roman citizens, that was the shared law, ensuring the common good.

Rules abounded in the world of Paul’s context. Rome had its own law. Greek culture and Jewish culture had values, expectations, and rules. Keeping the law was how one lived both as a unique people and as a member of a pluralistic society.  

What Paul isn’t saying is something simple like: The old way was sinful. Or: The secular world, or the worlds of previous faith systems, are bad or evil and have now been replaced by Jesus. 

No. What Paul is saying in our passage today and throughout the letter to the Romans is that sin insidiously uses what is good and holy to its own selfish and perverting ends. Did you catch that in our reading? 

Sin simply did what sin is so famous for doing: using the good as a cover to tempt me to do what would finally destroy me. (Romans 7:13)

And that’s what I kept finding myself saying in myriad ways this week in hundreds of conversations, both face-to-face and throughout social media. Today, being Christian means using secular and civic law as a weapon, as a means of control. It is now deemed legal to punish employees if their behavior is not within an arbitrary set of religious rules. Our common and civic law itself should be used to ensure a public good, but it is instead providing the means to harm and control others.

This is not new, of course. Our own Baptist forefather Roger Williams was expelled from Massachusetts in the 17th century because he would not conform to the laws requiring a puritanical Christianity. Williams believed that his faith required him to nurture a place where not only could he worship in his Baptist ways, but also where others could meet God how they would or would not. Freedom of religion. Freedom of worship.

Paul obviously thought it important to emphasize the point about our relationship with the law being a breeding ground for sin. He brings it up again and again in various ways, and I believe it’s a needed message for our churches today.

What might a new epistle to the Christians of America say? It might say that the law has created space for sin to eat away at our identity as followers of Christ. It has become a wedge into our hearts so that sin slips in and flourishes. Self-righteousness, judgment, anger, exclusion, revenge, punishment, and greed pass as Christian action in this, our sin-sick soul.

The community behavior that stands against the reign of God, the fruitful soil for sin here is the notion that America is a Christian nation. 

Oh, how I wish we acted as Christian nation in our civic policies. The U.S. Constitution states that we will have no establishment of a national religion. But what if we took that notion of Christian nationhood seriously as an ethical guide? What if we determined that for those of us who call ourselves Christians, we would behave as though this were a Christian nation?

We would have treated the native peoples we found when we arrived with respect and honor, and we would continually be moving to honor treaties forged with tribal leaders. We would never have enslaved fellow human beings to fuel our national appetites and growth, and we would reconcile this horror in all ways possible. We would feed all of the hungry without exception. Prisons, if needed at all, would be places of reconciliation and healing. 

No one would go without safety and shelter. All would be fed in the many ways that we are starving. 

Clearly, we fall short of this Gospel call. We also fall short of any Hebrew traditions of debt forgiveness, caring for the stranger, the alien, the widow and orphan. So banish any belief that we as American people adhere to broad Judeo-Christian ethics.  

A nation based on Judeo-Christian ethics seems like a pretty good idea. I mean, even Jesus said that He has sheep we know nothing about (John 10:16) so I guess this Christian nation would need to be religiously tolerant, as well. 

Seems like a great idea. To a point. 

As Paul would say, it’s not following the law that is the root of sin. It’s when the law enables sinful actions that we must repent and turn back toward God. We’re in trouble when adhering to any law or set of rules becomes more important than acting out of love. The law itself is not the problem. It’s what we let the law do to our hearts that nurtures sin.

I used to consider Hobby Lobby to be an ethical option if I needed craft supplies and the overtly gay-friendly Michael’s was closed or not nearby. Hobby Lobby may close on Sundays, taking a corporate Christian Sabbath, but it was at least unofficial policy that any Jewish employees could be exempt from Saturday shifts. We all need more Sabbath time in our lives, and to me that policy felt like a healthy manifestation of faith lived out in a corporate way. Hobby Lobby paid its employees a living wage and offered a generous benefits package. This kind of just labor practice is another way our faith can reach into the public sphere.  

But when the law is used as a weapon to exclude and to name people in or out of anyone’s definition of Christian righteousness, law has become an idol and a tool of sin. Christians who work for any of the other recent court plaintiffs or ANY business or organization and who want to follow their own version of Christian law and righteousness should feel free to do so. Yet while technically now legal via Supreme Court decision, threatening or harming another person in the name of that freedom is wrong.

I might disagree with their biblical interpretations of those who don’t want to pay for select medical treatment or procedures, and probably do, but I know we all reach God in different ways. But this recent debacle in our common civic life is a timely example of what Paul called sin doing what sin does, using the good to do its own destructive mischief.

Examples of sin hiding within the law are all around us. For example, it seems perfectly righteous to deny services to those who do not pay for them – in the eyes of the law, anyway. But when hundreds of impoverished households in one of the most economically depressed cities in our country have had their water shut off, as is happening this very moment in Detroit, we have strayed far from the core of our call as Christians. When children fleeing violence and persecution in their native countries are corralled and jailed like livestock, we have strayed far.

Christ is the only remedy for this, Paul would say. Something new now binds us as a people, something new guides our hearts and our actions. Paul would remind us that this struggle for Christian identity is ongoing. 

We so desperately want the law to save us. We so desperately want to do what is right and to have a set list of behaviors to follow in order to be aligned with God. But when this struggle is our overwhelming goal and mission, we have been misled. 

A new letter to the Christians of America would assert that many of us are doing the wrong work in an attempt to fulfill what we believe is God’s law. Our real work is to live out Christ’s commandments to love God and one another with all that we are. Our real work is to throw open our arms and our doors and our hearts in celebration of the abundance around us, in gratitude for the example of Christ’s faith and devotion to this deeper law. 

This is much more difficult than following set rules, than being led by law. Christ knows that’s true. Paul knows that’s true. You and I know that’s true.

Let us pray.

1) Joseph A. Fitzmyer S.J., Romans: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, vol. 33, Anchor Yale Bible (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2008), 77.