Sermon Starters: Dual Citizenship

Preached in chapel at IWU Monday. My assigned text was Philippians 3:17-21.

I. Recap of Philippians

• Because this is in a series of Monday sermons this semester over Philippians, I decided to start with a recap of the book up to this point.
• Philippians is a thank you letter. They have sent Paul a care package while he's in jail waiting an appearance before some Roman official. 
• This is perhaps Paul's dearest church. Galatians gave him problems. Corinthians really gave him problems. Philippians repeatedly sent him help (Paul didn't take aid from a church while he was there).
• Two chief themes of Philippians: rejoicing in suffering and unity amid squabbling.
• Rejoice while in jail??? "I have learned to be content whatever my circumstances" (4:12). "Rejoice in the Lord always and again I say..." (4:4).
• Chapter 1: "For me to live is Christ, to die is gain" (1:22). Victor Frankl: "A person can live with any how if they have a why."
• Chapter 2: heavy on the unity. Have the mind of Christ. Be "one-souled."
• Chapter 3. Paul digresses into those who might try the congregation to get circumcised and convert to Judaism. He has a good Jewish resume--it's nothing, dung, next to the surpassing greatness of Christ. 

II. The verses of the morning

• Follow his example.
• There are enemies of Christ out there: Romans like those who have him in jail, Jews who do not believe Jesus is the Messiah, Christians who believe you have to convert fully to Judaism.
• Their god is their belly--focus on pleasure? Judaizers and food laws?
• "But our citizenship is in heaven."

III. Our citizenship is in heaven.
What was in the "bubble" above Paul's head?
A. Jerusalem?

• fits the theme of Philippians 3
• Today, we might relate it to visible Christian groups like denominations, local churches, Christian colleges, etc.
• No visible group equates to the invisible church.
• Not all Wesleyans are citizens of heaven. Not all IWU students are likely to be citizens of heaven. Not all who attend or are members of College Wesleyan Church are likely to be citizens of heaven.
• Matthew 13--the wheat and the weeds

B. Roman citizenship?

• Particularly relevant is the fact that Philippi was a Roman colony. If you were a citizen of the city of Philippi, you were a citizen of Rome, a great honor and privilege.
• But that's nothin. That's dung next to the surpassing greatness of Christ. Like a drop of water next to the ocean of the greatness of God's kingdom.
• No earthly group is holy enough to compare to the kingdom of God. No human citizenship is anything but dung next to the surpassing greatness of Christ and his kingdom.
• On the one hand, there's nothing wrong with being excited about your heritage. I'm a mixture of English, Scottish, Dutch, and German.  I'm an American. My Dad was in WW2. I'm proud to be an American.
• But we must never come anywhere close to equating such things, such groups--my family, my ethnicity, my country--with the kingdom of God. That's blasphemy.
• All groups have shame in their story too. "All [groups] have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God."
• I'm proud that so far in American history, "The arch of justice is long but it bends toward justice" (MLK). But it took eighty years and a horrible, horrible war to end race slavery. That's shame in the American story. It took a hundred more to allow African-Americans to use the same bathroom and drink from the same water fountain as others There is plenty of shame in the American story, in addition to the things we might boast about. 
• There is no country, ethnicity, or family that is holy enough to be equated with the kingdom of heaven... not even close.

IV. Dual citizenship

• How do we live as both citizens of heaven and earth?
• Never confuse any visible, earthly group with the kingdom based in the heavens.
• Remember that the kingdom of God is always contextualized. There is no earthly embodiment of the kingdom that is not enculturated (this includes the people of God in Scripture). Love God, love neighbor are principles, but how that looks in a specific context is enculturated.
• Some guidelines. The kingdom of God is more redemptive than punitive.
• The kingdom of God is more unifying than dividing.
• The kingdom of God is more about mutual submission and yielding to others than forcing others.
• We have to work out these things with prayer and fasting, in community, working out our salvation with fear and trembling.

Judeo-Christian Values of America

More in my series on whether American Christianity is in decline:

• Did Constantine and Theodosius make Rome Christian?
• When did Europe become Christian?
• Theories of Western decline
• A more dialectical view
• Wesley, Arminius, and the Enlightenment

So we arrive at America. Was America founded with Christian values? Was the foundation of America "Judeo-Christian"?

1. First, to collect some thoughts from the previous posts above. One thesis is that, as far as real Christians go, people with the Holy Spirit within who are serving God with their whole heart, this is always a minority of people. So Europe may have been Christian for a millennium, but we should only expect to see a fraction of them in the coming kingdom of God, maybe as small a number as 20% of all those who have called themselves Christians throughout the ages (somewhat arbitrarily using contemporary statistics).

2. So in what sense was Europe Christian in form, having a form of godliness? It was mostly orthodox Christian in belief. To be sure, the diminishment of Catholic power made deviations like Socinianism (which didn't believe in the Trinity) or the pantheism of Spinoza possible to be held more openly. Deism was quite popular in intellectual circles in the 1600s and 1700s.

Was it Christian in its outward actions? Certainly the Spanish conquest of the new world had nothing of any substance to do with Christianity. I doubt we will see Columbus, Cortez, Pizarro, or any of these gold-thirsty murderers in the kingdom of God.

If the kings of England are any indication, adultery may have been frowned on but was apparently all too common fare in the everyday life of the English male.

Disparity reigned supreme until the 1600s. The Parliament of England astoundingly executed Charles I in 1649, a clear mark in the movement toward democracy and the shift of power from kings to people. Americans would not include the divine right of kings in what is meant by Judeo-Christian values although the idea of kings is clearly biblical.

The point here is that we are unaware of the influence of American culture on us if we think of democracy (or a Republic) as obviously biblical. For most of Christian history, monarchies were the name of the game, with at least a more straightforward claim to being biblical.

3. It seems that the phrase "Judeo-Christian" itself wasn't really used in the way we use it today until the twentieth century, especially in the 1940s. President Dwight Eisenhower invoked the phrase in reference to the concept that "all men are created equal" in 1952. It was under his presidency, in response to the rise of communism, that the phrase, "one nation under God" was added to the pledge of allegiance in 1954.

I would of course agree that the equal value of all humanity is a biblical principle, but we also have to reckon that this notion was not used to advocate for democracy until the Enlightenment in the 1700s. It must therefore be a valid "translation" of the Bible into the modern era.

But the expression has been used extensively since the 1950s. It played a significant role in the anti-communist rhetoric of the 1980s, for example. "Judeo-Christian" could thus imply capitalism, an economic system that really didn't develop again until the late 1700s and the Enlightenment. It is, again, a translation of certain biblical themes into the Enlightenment era.

Again, the fact that capitalism did not really exist until two hundred years ago suggests that it has less a claim to be straightforwardly biblical or Judeo-Christian than an agrarian or bartering society. For me this fact does not undermine capitalism as an economic form. It just reminds us that we are wearing cultural glasses if we think it is somehow straightforwardly biblical.

In recent times, the phrase Judeo-Christian has been linked to the Ten Commandments. Don't kill. Don't steal. But these are of course well nigh universal human values. Keeping the sabbath in American history has a decidedly cultural dimension (since the biblical sabbath was on Saturday). Not swearing is a cultural version of a commandment that was originally about keeping vows. Not lying is a cultural version of a commandment that was originally about bearing false witness in a legal context.

4. So we have to refocus the question again. Christian religion did seem to play a fairly unique and distinctive role in the founding matrix of American identity. However, the probes of this conversation, just getting to this point, already hint that the religious matrix was a "translation" of the Bible into the cultural world of Europe and Britian in particular in the 1600s and 1700s.

I think it was a brilliant translation. But it is important to say that the Christian values, the Judeo-Christian values, the biblical values on which America was founded were values heavily filtered by the Enlightenment and by the English culture of the 1600s and 1700s. To suggest a more direct basis in the Bible we would have to say that everyone up until that point and elsewhere was biblically illiterate.

Pete Enns' sense of the Newsweek article

Here is Pete Enns' sense of the Newsweek article to which I responded on Monday. His take-away is that, amid all the inflammatory rhetoric and mistaken details, there is some truth in the article.

What is "Civil Religion"?

Things that we value get mixed. Since all the mixing takes place in our heads, we often don't realize it. We look out at the world through one set of eyes, so we may not realize that we have apples and oranges all twisted up in our perceptions of the world.

Our religion and our nationalism VERY frequently get intertwined to where we can't tell where God ends and country begins. After all, they are both two things we love, so it is easy for them both to get mixed up together. (By the way, Keith Drury wrote on this 15 years ago).

It's often pretty innocent. So we celebrate July 4 in church. We have an American flag on the pulpit. In church we honor those who have lost their lives in war.  Maybe we even call Americans to repentance and to turn to the Lord. These are all fairly innocent mixings of our faith with our nationalism.

Of course it drives Christians who come here from Canada crazy. German Christians who visit us find it very alarming indeed. We have no idea how silly we look to faith-filled believers who aren't swimming in it like we are--a fish doesn't know it's wet. But as long as no one gets hurt, it's probably not worth fighting over.

How does it work? Here are some of the dynamics (thanks to the Facebook discussion for some of these):

1. The Founders become apostles and saints.
It becomes increasingly hard to view any of the founders of the country as normal people. "I cannot tell a lie. I chopped down the cherry tree." As great as these people may have been, they become more than superheroes. They become saints, and to say anything different evokes the same reaction as blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

In fact, their words take on a Scriptural quality. Like memory verses in the Bible, we rip their words out of their historical context and quote them as inspired truth. So we forget that, in addition to being a brilliant thinker and inventor, Benjamin Franklin was also an adulterer who seriously doubted that Jesus was divine. Instead, we quote with pious devotion the words, "I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That He governs it by His Providence. That he ought to be worshipped." [With solemn music playing in the background]

2. The Constitution and Declaration become the Scriptures.
Not only do quotes become Scripture memory verses. But the founding documents take on a certain Scriptural quality. The right to bear arms, the freedom of religion, these become quasi-Ten Commandments. The founding stories become like the story of the Exodus. Our emotional commitment to these things is pretty much the same as our commitment to Scripture.

Like the biblical canon, we have the Genesis stories of Christopher Columbus and the Mayflower. We have the exodus stories of the Revolutionary War as we escape from the hands of Pharaoh (or King George as the case may be). The Boston Tea Party is like blood in the Nile. The stories of Lincoln and the Civil War are another book in the canon, a kind of New Testament that completes the Old.

We treat these stories as if they are as holy as the stories in the Bible. The emotions they raise and our devotion to them is incredibly similar, if not the same. So also is our hostility toward those "liberal scholars" who might question the historicity of some of our traditions. We show the same hostility we show toward "liberal" biblical scholars in relation to the stories of the Bible.

3. Patriotic songs take on a hymn-like quality.
I get stirred up singing about Christ. I get stirred up singing about America. So why not sing about America in church, since I get the same feeling? Even more, let's sing "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" and "How Firm a Foundation" at a Fourth of July celebration of America. I get the same feeling singing both.

God judges the heart, so I imagine we're ok, but this is really almost blasphemous. How spooky would it be if a crowd of Wesleyans sang "How Firm a Foundation" about God's founding of The Wesleyan Church with Lutherans and Baptists sitting with us? Now imagine singing that about America, which isn't even a church, with Christians from Africa or England listening in.

4. America becomes Israel and the Church.
America isn't in the Bible. It certainly isn't Israel. 2 Chronicles 7:14 wasn't about America. Of course it's fine for Americans to repent, but America isn't the "my people" of this verse. Really pretty arrogant of us, when you think of it. We're not even saying that American Christians are better than "second rate" Christians in Iraq or Africa who haven't suffered like we have. We're saying that a nation filled with non-followers of Christ is something like the body of Christ.

Think about it. Not even earthly Israel has this status. Paul can say of his own people, "they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel" (Rom. 9:6). Yet we would somehow equate America with God's people? It would be ludicrously hilarious if it weren't so seriously misguided.

Still worse--again, really blasphemous--God overlooks our ignorance--1 Peter 2:9 should NEVER be applied to the United States. Peter is referring to the body of Christ here, the invisible Church.

Imagine if I applied this verse to The Wesleyan Church--"You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation..." Some might laugh at me--seriously a denomination? This relates to the universal Church, the invisible body of believers everywhere and spread throughout all time. I suspect more would be quite outraged that I would consider a denomination to be God's special people.

But then see how much FAR more inappropriate it is to connect a verse like this one to a nation like America. No nation is holy enough. It's really blasphemy of incredible proportions. Thankfully, God judges our hearts not our smarts.

4. Soldiers become martyrs.
Certainly I believe in honoring those who fight for America, but they are no more saints than the founders. You don't automatically go to heaven if you die in battle. You don't get years off purgatory for being wounded in battle. There are virtuous soldiers and there are wicked ones. You are not justified by works in battle. Nope, still faith in Jesus Christ.

5. We have holy days and holy rituals.
In many churches, July 4, Memorial Day, and Veteran's Day are as or more significant than Christmas or Easter. Those same churches perhaps have never heard of Advent or even think of Lent as evil, some Catholic perversity. To me it is perfectly acceptable to celebrate the blessings God has given us as a nation, as long as we don't actually think we are somehow more special in God's eyes because we were born here.

And that's actually an important point. God loves the illegal immigrant just as much as he loves the person who breaks the speed limit or cheats on income taxes.

6. The flag becomes a symbol like the cross.
I imagine that there may be as many American flags on the platforms of American churches as there are crosses. Indeed, there are probably a good many American churches that would be angry at the idea of having a cross because of some association of it with Catholic perversity.

But don't you dare question having an American flag there! For a sense of how bizarre this is, imagine seeing a British flag on the platform of a British church or a Russian flag in a Russian church or a German flag in a German church.

I know we don't mean anything by it. We're not seriously suggesting that loyalty to America is somehow as significant as submission to the Lordship of Jesus. We're not seriously suggesting that America is holy somehow like the Church is holy. We don't take our shoes off near the flag as if God somehow dwelt in it like the burning bush.

We just love our country and that's good. I believe God isn't offended at the inappropriateness of confusing what we do in church with what we do when we vote. He is very patient with us, I believe.

7. Those who question become heretics.
I hope I have been kind enough not to raise too much anger with this post. The indignation and wrath of those offended in relation to civil religion is often of the same intensity as that toward those who mess with traditions about Christian faith. That's because those who have a civil form of religion can't fully tell the difference between the two.

Again, I'm eternally grateful that God judges us by our hearts rather than by our smarts.

Catching the Wrong-Doer

We say we believe in God, but our actions sometimes betray a lack of trust.  Sometimes I get nervous when flying.  I tell myself that there's absolutely nothing I can do to affect the outcome of the flight.  There's nothing I can do to make the flight stay up, and there would be nothing I could do to mess up the flight, even if I wanted to.

Anxiousness and fearfulness is perfectly human. It's not something you can just turn off, even if your head knows it's inappropriate.  It's a little like an addiction. You can tell someone to stop doing something they're addicted to, but their will is impaired.  It's probably going to take some outside help, including help from God.

But my head tells me that in such moments of fear, I should trust in God. He can effect the outcome of the flight.  If there is some mechanical issue waiting to surface, God can take care of it.  And if he doesn't, it must be for some greater purpose.  The proper posture is trust.

I think many Christians also have a similar below the surface lack of trust when it comes to catching out the "law-breaker."  Christian colleges used to expend considerable energy not only creating rules but making every effort to make sure those who broke them were caught. I know a professor who has an elaborate system to figure out whether students have cheated on an objective test.

I use a moderate number of common sense checks.  Give alternating versions of the test to students sitting next to each other with the questions in a different order.  Online tests can randomize the order, give the questions one by one and not let you go back once you've given your answer.

But I was struck when I taught a few courses at Notre Dame at the honor system they had back then. If you choose to cheat, you're only hurting yourself in the long run. And, after all, God knows.  I still think it makes sense to protect students from themselves a little, to help them do the right thing.  But, ultimately, I think the honor system reflects a more mature ethic.

It is our business to work so that people do not harm others. But it is not our responsibility to make sure wrong-doers get their just deserts and punishment. We should try to stop people from harming others--including themselves.  But it's not our job to make sure wrong-doers are caught and punished. That's God's job--and of course the job of the government when it is a common law (rather than a specifically Christian law, Rom. 13).

Do we trust God to do what is right with those who break the rules?  Or do we think if we don't catch them, they'll get by with stuff?  This attitude may not only reflect a lack of trust in God, who sees and does the right thing.  It may also betray Jonah or elder brother syndrome in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, where we're afraid God will show the wrong-doer mercy.

American Syncretism in Christian Worship

Couldn't come up with a better title.  This week in the seminary's worship class they are looking at acts of worship beyond baptism, communion, and other sign acts (last week involved everything from tongues to footwashing).  We're talking weddings, funerals, and things we might put in the category of "civil religion," including the frequent intersection of nationalism with Christian worship.

For example, I don't get too bent out of shape over it, but it seems very peculiar to put an American flag in the pulpit area.  We are so used to this practice that it is hard for us to see how truly bizarre it is.  To try to get at the bizarreness, imagine how Dietrich Bonhoeffer would respond if he had walked in after seeing Nazi flags in German churches?  Picture a Brazilian flag on a pulpit in Brazil or a Russian flag in a Russian Orthodox chancel.  Are we saying that we worship our country along with God or that our country is as holy as the cross.  Imagine how we Protestants would react to an icon of a Christian saint up front--and it's at least Christian!  God smiles.

There are other perspectives you commonly hear from worship professors, things that most American ministers have never even thought of.  For example, although I think God is very patient, I would strongly urge couples getting married to include the congregation in communion if they are having it.  Communion is not something two people do in private.  It is a body of Christ thing. 

Other things worship experts often say, perhaps with less force than the above: 1) having a wedding outside rather than in a church building hints at a mindset that is probably leaning more secular than Christian; 2) the Wedding March comes from A Midsummer Night's Dream, hardly a Christian drama, and is odd in a worship service; 3) close the casket at a funeral because a Christian funeral should be a worship service, and a worship service is more about God than the individual who has died; 4) some even argue against the typical time of testimonials to the dead person in the worship service of the funeral proper.

What are your thoughts?  I always smile at a church that makes a big deal out of Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Mother's Day, but couldn't tell you what Advent or Ash Wednesday was to save its life.  This is the typical syncretism of religion and culture that takes place everywhere in all religions.

Southern Baptist Piece on Glenn Beck

Someone sent me this link: Should Glenn Beck Speak for Christians?

The article didn't light me up, but I thought I would post it for your reaction. Here's the paragraph that I identified most with:

"It’s taken us a long time to get here, in this plummet from Francis Schaeffer to Glenn Beck. In order to be this gullible, American Christians have had to endure years of vacuous talk about undefined 'revival' and 'turning America back to God' that was less about anything uniquely Christian than about, at best, a generically theistic civil religion and, at worst, some partisan political movement."

God-Inspired Constitution

I was struck by this line in an article on the local Tea Party movement: So and so "called the Constitution a document derived from divine inspiration that is being manipulated, destroyed and ignored by presiding politicians."

Now I know reporters get things wrong. They often seem to miss fine distinctions that are very important to the people they are interviewing or they stereotype the person they are interviewing. But if this is even close to accurate, it is also close to blasphemy.

I love the Constitution because I think the Enlightenment brought immense benefits to the Western world. The notion of a societal social contract, of inalienable individual rights, of the dispassionate quest for truth, of individual liberty, of laissez-faire economics, these are all products of the Enlightenment, associated with names like Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Smith, and Bentham.

They also can stand in serious tension with Christian values and must be carefully balanced and reigned in from Christian perspective. How about that slaves being 3/5 of a person thing, was that divinely inspired? Should we get rid of the amendments to the Constitution, because anyone who adds or takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, well, you know.

Here's the bottom line: God comes before country--if you really believe in Him. If you don't believe in God and want to worship the Constitution, you're a little weird (and in danger of hell fire), but at least you're more coherent. I love the Constitution, but I think I'll stand back from wherever you're standing.

P.S. The Constitution also allows for taxes (so does the Bible--which commands its audiences to pay them).

P.S.S. And you have representation (the Bible doesn't care whether you have representation when it says to pay them).