Friday, April 12, 2024

Bursting the Flags Bursting the Air

A sermon by Rev. Douglas Olds

Point Reyes (CA) Community Presbyterian Church

Sunday, April 14, 2024 


"This is a Christian nation!" 

Jesus: "My kingdom is not of this world." 

"We need to take back this country for Christ!" 

Jesus: "My kingdom is not of this world."

"We need to have the government legislate Christian values!" 

Jesus: "My kingdom is not of this world." 

Our role as followers of Jesus in relationship to our nation is to be a prophetic witness on behalf of the poor, the powerless, and the vulnerable among us. 

~BENJAMIN CREMER 


Sermon Audio linked here


OT Reading:  Second Samuel 7:1-29

Now when the king was settled in his house, and the LORD had given him rest from all his enemies around him, 2 the king said to the prophet Nathan, “See now, I am living in a house of cedar, but the ark of God stays in a tent.” 3 Nathan said to the king, “Go, do all that you have in mind; for the LORD is with you.”

4 But that same night the word of the LORD came to Nathan: 5 Go and tell my servant David: Thus says the LORD: Are you the one to build me a house to live in? 6 I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle. 7 Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, “Why have you not built me a house of cedar?” 8 Now therefore thus you shall say to my servant David: Thus says the LORD of hosts: I took you from the pasture, from following the sheep to be prince over my people Israel; 9 and I have been with you wherever you went, and have cut off all your enemies from before you; and I will make for you a great name, like the name of the great ones of the earth. 10 And I will appoint a place for my people Israel and will plant them, so that they may live in their own place, and be disturbed no more; and evildoers shall afflict them no more, as formerly, 11 from the time that I appointed judges over my people Israel; and I will give you rest from all your enemies. Moreover the LORD declares to you that the LORD will make you a house. 12 When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. 13 He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. 14 I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me. When he commits iniquity, I will punish him with a rod such as mortals use, with blows inflicted by human beings. 15 But I will not take my steadfast love from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away from before you. 16 Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever. 17 In accordance with all these words and with all this vision, Nathan spoke to David.

 18 Then King David went in and sat before the LORD, and said, “Who am I, O Lord GOD, and what is my house, that you have brought me thus far? 19 And yet this was a small thing in your eyes, O Lord GOD; you have spoken also of your servant’s house for a great while to come. May this be instruction for the people, O Lord GOD! 20 And what more can David say to you? For you know your servant, O Lord GOD! 21 Because of your promise, and according to your own heart, you have wrought all this greatness, so that your servant may know it. 22 Therefore you are great, O LORD God; for there is no one like you, and there is no God besides you, according to all that we have heard with our ears. 23 Who is like your people, like Israel? Is there another nation on earth whose God went to redeem it as a people, and to make a name for himself, doing great and awesome things for them, by driving out before his people nations and their gods? 24 And you established your people Israel for yourself to be your people forever; and you, O LORD, became their God. 25 And now, O LORD God, as for the word that you have spoken concerning your servant and concerning his house, confirm it forever; do as you have promised. 26 Thus your name will be magnified forever in the saying, ‘The LORD of hosts is God over Israel’; and the house of your servant David will be established before you. 27 For you, O LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, have made this revelation to your servant, saying, ‘I will build you a house’; therefore your servant has found courage to pray this prayer to you. 28 And now, O Lord GOD, you are God, and your words are true, and you have promised this good thing to your servant; 29 now therefore may it please you to bless the house of your servant, so that it may continue forever before you; for you, O Lord GOD, have spoken, and with your blessing shall the house of your servant be blessed forever.”

 

NT Reading: Romans 3:19-31 

Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. 20 For “no human being will be justified in his sight” by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin.

 21 But now, apart from law,[2] the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, 22 the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, 23 since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; 24 they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; 26 it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.

27 Then what becomes of boasting? It is excluded. By what law? By that of works? No, but by the law of faith. 28 For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law. 29 Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, 30 since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the ground of faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. 31 Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law. 


Flags Bursting in Air

Our OT reading this morning introduces the tragic imperial reach of nations. David has been promised an eternal house by God and is determined to mirror that promise by building a house for God that advertises to his people his relationship with God. Unlike Moses receiving the specific instructions to build and detail the tabernacle, the first temple emerged from a dynastic impulse realized by David’s son Solomon.

Goethe wrote: "Are we not here for the very purpose of making the transitory everlasting? And this can happen, of course, only when we are able to value both."

Yet the OT is a story of the unfolding history of Israel as it inverts these relative values, favoring by seeking to construct and secure the permanent, seeking the institutionalization of state and religion, while devaluing what is transitory, what is manifold and fractal and dancing and generative of shalom rather than emplacing stones that can and will be thrown. As it submits to human priorities for security rather than God’s trustworthy promises, the political actors of the OT repeatedly and routinely put subsidiary things first, and the first things of God’s promises and covenants second. In these inversions, we see the theology of state symbols displacing obligations to neighbors. We see succeeding generations ever crawling through the mire of nostalgia, seeking improvement in stone rather than in the generative living stone, the danced, the fractal individuality of the snowflake rather than the institutions of snowforts. The bomb bursting in air rather than planting the flower blooming in the wind, even though it  is transitory, may wither and fade in its season to give rise to another season, another bloom, another dance. In activity and renewal is permanence, not in guarded towers.

The first things of God are never state theology; it is the neighbor love walked and extended in Jesus of Nazareth. What Paul in our reading this morning The Law of righteousness apart from law—apart from human institutions of criminological inquisitions. The Law of Love manifest on the Cross that unseparates us from the pragmatic philosophical state that ever tries to separate us from God and the obligations of the Golden Rule.

But first Israel in the promised land documented other ways. The house of David, by trying to mirror the initiative of God for dynastic and power-institutionalizing reasons, comes to advertise, by mirroring, a special relationship with the divine. At that point, the survival of these institutions becomes seen in the Biblical witness as contingent on the dynast’s and their proxies’ performances of intentions to mirror the divine volition; and to the extent they proclaimed such, they were held to that account.  God’s promises are never contingent, but human responses set themselves up in theologies of merit that becomes their measure for others. But Jesus says (Matt7: 2): by the measure you give will be the measure you get.

Once these institutions create false theologies of contingencies, they themselves are subject to those same contingencies, and predictably, they are doomed to fail because they are unable to live up to their own systematic warrants and claims. They become hypocrites. Their temples are ever doomed by their inverted theologies and false hearts.

This institutionalizing of religion in service of the state is ever behind these initiatives of rulers. This is behind the placement of flags: to confirm for ourselves of our performances that give us a sense of security for the covenant promises of god. But these grand initiatives are not only not necessary, for God’s covenants are true, but actually can mislead us as to how we are living secure—in a flag territory because we’ve linked that flag to our given places we hope permanent. And once we do that, our injustices get tied to that flag by the righteousness of God. Political symbols neither warrant god’s covenantal care nor advertise to others a special relationship. Instead,

We seek permanence of place and preferred order by tying church and state together, but in so doing we are held to prophetic standards of being just and provisional to all, no matter how impermanent inside the state structures we create. If we set ourselves up by institutions as representatives of God’s justice and God’s plan, we are held to the highest standard of that justice. This is the repeated prophetic critique of Israel’s monarchs.

But there is a preceding error in this construction of state theology. It misconstrues what it means to be a nation. A nation is not a state apparatus. It is not a Napoleonic reflection of the excellence and will of its leader. A nation in the OT and into the era of the church is not a kinship structure, nor in the last 300 years of tragic applications of biological science, a nation is not a race or genetic order.

The Day of Pentecost confirms that the nation was an historical language group that shared an historical archive and values embedded and derived therein. The Exodus from slavery led by Moses and Aaron expose too that the Israelites were liberated slaves from the Pharaonic world system. Some were descendents of the 12 tribes of Jacob, but the Bible speaks of fellow travelers in the Exodus who weren’t: the gerim. These were accorded rights of religious and political participation by virtue of neighborhood and shared, linguistically mediated values and commitment to the liberating God. Nationhood is ever deliberated linguistically, adhered to shared will and not coerced. Biblical nationhood is a spiritual project on the way to developing civilizations of care, not punitive, exclusionary, and purified social orders according to some hegemon’s nostalgia seeking eternal return.

Into this fitful but progressive sequence of nation building in the church has repeated various redefinitions of nationhood to justify claims of controlling their narratives and their orders. First going by the name of “dominionism,” where religious authorities claimed rights over the non-religious. The medieval church formulated the doctrine of discovery that transferred land tenure from indigenous natives in the New World to Old World Christian masters on the basis that the natives were not exercising western methods of efficient exploitation-- that the European masters would improve husbandry and evangelize the pagans.

We see from this power-extension an inverted—perverted--sequence of hegemonic hierarchies and authoritarian tragedies that don’t always originate in the church, but come to recruit the church’s symbols and speak its language because of the prestige of Jesus Christ and the claim of a special relationship with the absolute:

Behind the Doctrine of Discovery of the medieval church: “God designed the Europeans to rule over the indigenous.”

Behind the Dred Scott decision and the Confederacy: “God designed the white man to rule over black men and women.”

Behind patriarchal dominionism: “God designed men to rule over women.”

Behind Christian Nationalism: God designed Christians to rule America.

God designed OT corporal punishments to structure the American Social order and soul.

And Behind Religious flag realism: God designed America to subjugate the world orders by force of arms.

Christian nationalists are perverting religious language, which, as the foundation of an ethnos,[1] a biblical nation as language collective, is actually ethnic treason. Political lies, propaganda, and conspiratorial shams are linguistic treason:

what Pinker [ Enlightenment Now, 358–59 emph. orig.] calls the Tragedy of the Belief Commons which rejects, misquotes, and misapplies “expertise, brainpower, and conscious reasoning,” instead to ingeniously and ruthlessly manipulate these for the purposes of generating in-group boundaries and demonizing opponents.  This process of bludgeoning the truth crawls and may be recognized in

"blue lies and [sham] beliefs are expressed for the purpose of performance rather than truth: they are trying to antagonize liberals and display solidarity with their blood brothers. The anthropologist John Tooby adds that preposterous beliefs are more effective signals of coalitional loyalty than reasonable ones."  We call this propaganda, but I’m calling it ethnic treason. The purposeful degradation of language for sucking others into the void of violence and fascism and lies, and the eternal regret that follows because this ethnic treason to the language group disestablishes love and neighborliness. Melancholic nostalgia and its distortion in catastrophic apocalyptic expectations is the mother of all treachery and noxious theology underlying it.

For demonizers of enemies like Gen. Mike Flynn, interogating Beliefing, always beliefing attempts to make secure by exclusion, never  by ethics that gentle and create civilizations of care. Christian nationalist belief is performance of malice at outsiders, criminalizing them, not belief aligning with empathy and GR care and repair. These christian nationalist authoritarians who collect around symbols of “heritage:” the Confederacy’s flag, the Pine Tree “Appeal to Heaven” flag of the Am. Revolution that is residing outside Mike Johnson’s speaker’s office. That “protestant’ flag in the back that mistakes territorial institutionalism and offices with the deinstitutionalization of the reformers. 

Increasingly the far-right is adopting Christian charismatic language because the characterization of political enemies as “demon possessed” serves murderous sets of applications, desensitizing ourselves to think of others as nonhuman and deserving of scorn or elimination.  Vladimir Putin compares himself to Jesus as he faces off against 'satanic' West. See the pattern of misusing Christianity by the power hungry, who use threats to make an impression that they claim is orthodox? They use codewords that give them plausible deniability as to their intent, but in reality play games with language which they try to cover with flags and false sentiments and bastard anthems and thank you for your service for dropping bombs and threats of conformity and call these traditional values but are far from the Law of Love, the Golden Rule.

This outreach of Christian nationalists to the young, like hill staffers, some of whom are confused about Christian life, others who want to join the power base forming Christian nationalism that uses political and religious language to demonize and dehumanize. And win no matter what the cost to the Logos of our language and the Christian values embedded in it to be shared with newcomers and new borns.

It is a surprise that mainline Protestants align in some way with the goals and methods of Christian nationalism, and this warrants analysis and understanding. When we think of PCUSA mainline, we don’t think of Davidic monarchic politics and building of temples. Often considered more liberal or progressive than rightwing evangelicals drawn to the inquisitions of “belief”, mainliners have a different approach to scripture—not holding to inerrancy and simple and static meanings that literally endure through historical epochs and ground nostalgia. They have a different approach to ethics, which I wrote a book about—that bottom-up virtues calm neighborhoods in contrast with strategizing top-down authorities. Mainline  churches take care of framing social justice In their approach faith and raise it  beyond simple affirmation of “beliefs.” They believe in historical progress, not a recurrence of historical forms leading to apocalyptic catastrophe. When we think of Christian nationalism, we think of conservative evangelicals,

When, in the mid-20th C, mainline protestants drove civil, religious policy in this country, it was more demographically homogeneous. The right wing performance of malice hates this social change and wants to restore the US to some 1965, pre-MLK, and in some cases pre-civil war vision of social order. Their claim is that God is found in the past and that sin has taken over. Let me be very clear: this is wrong and theologically toxic. God is driving social change, which includes demographic change and deinstitutionalization of authorities of preferred social orders. The church is not living for a time of social restoration and nostalgiaic return, but is being led to individualize responsibility for neighbors and create the civilization of healing that has always been the waystation in the Kingdom of God. We are advanced on the path that tolerates and incorporates others with different commitments. We are not meant to “heal a social order” by exclusion and criminal investigation of beliefs, but by reaching out to every neighbor encountered in our daily walk.

By the 20th century the mainlines exercised tremendous cultural and social influence. Whether naively or cynically they believed that what was good for the mai line WAS good for society and vice versa. This was termed in the 1950s the civil religion discourse that said to adVance the cause of Christ from our tradition is going to be good not just for the church BUT for wider society under challenge of communism. Civil Religion was founded on a more homogeneous society coalescing around what was becoming termed the american way of life. When Eisenhower attended a mainline church while president, the alerted preacher made his sermon about putting the phrase “under God” into the pledge of Allegiance where it had not been before. And this sermon framed atheists as social parasites.

Into this muscular moment for mainline Protestantism, some darker Presbyterian elements came in: RJ Rushdoony and his reconstructionism proposed to define the American way of life on OT terms. He proposed a certain way of reading the OT that called for death for heresy, for false teachings (as he defined them), for Adultery, and other behavioral challenges to authority. Corporal punishment for children. This Reconstructionist/OT “dominionism” claimed it was the only way to understand Christianity and interrogate Christian claimants, and it was legalistic and criminological in nation-state terms. It entirely missed the message of Pentecost that a nation was a voluntary assemblage of language groups. Reconstructionists proposed to put under capital discipline those who opposed their one, inerrant way of ‘belief.’ The evangelist John  (16: 2b-3) warns of them:  "Indeed, an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God. 3And they will do this because they have not known the Father or me."

According to recent polling 1/3 of mainline protestants are sympathetic to Christian nationalism. To the relationship of Cross and Flag.  I’m not your pastor, but your moderator which in our denomination is tasked with knowing the big picture, to consider the times we are leaving in, to lead its councils to address challenges, dangers, and opportunities for the church as social conditions change. We are in one such moment, which reformers call “Kairos,” to address the two paths open to social change: to find a home in nostalgia of the 1950s-70 when “civil religion” was defined by bombs bursting in air and “one nation under God,” the Christian God. My friends, in the PCUSA a moderator is a prophet: those times are not coming back. Nostalgia is always a dead and death-dealing end, at best in melancholy and disappointment.

While mainliners have done much good work in redressing their responsibility for slavery and its legacy in this country, there are calls to which I join that the PCUSA needs to study and acknowledge its participation in Christian nationalism that continues to call for the criminalization and corporal disciplining of otherness, esp. beliefs not endorsed by a religious institutionalism and authoritarianism. The price of this acknowledgement is eternal vigilance. Rushdoony like others have written favorably about slavery and hypothesize its return.

Paul in Romans says to avoid these guys, because they are ADJACENT to the woe they wish on others but destined as their mirror. They thrive on rejecting and judging anyone whose beliefs don't completely align with THEIRS, BUT LIKE The rest of us, THEY ARE BLIND TO THEIR flaws, but these are MAGNIFIED BY an identifying INTOLERANCE AND bitter rejoicing in nostalgia they hope to institutionalize.

“Rom 2.13 For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but the doers of the law who will be justified. 14 When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves. 15 They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness…They have the appearance of godliness [in their talk about belief], but they deny the power” of love by withdrawing into the Christian national security state and the nostalgia and false consciousness of fixed social orders based on tribal (not spiritual) kinship.

Paul goes on in the next chapter to say that

Christians are to uphold the Law, the Law of Love. This is righteousness apart from (anarthrous) generic human legalism and disciplining.  Do you see that transcendent law in the flag? I don’t. Maybe love for our families, for our lineages, for our “heritage.” For our modern plantations and gated communities. But love for our neighbors, each and every one, in that flag which has a history of a social order founded on the enslavement of people defined as 3/5 a voting being? In a shrinking world where more and more come into our view, a crowding world ever challenging us to love strangers and enemies. Is the flag part of this? Christian Nationalists talk like only a government run by Christians could possibly be run in a just and moral way. But Paul the Apostle talks as though sometimes “parasites” and atheists have a better sense of justice and morality than Christians do. This is behind the USA political experiment that puts deliberation into the primacy of ethnicity and excludes criminal inquistitions of beliefing.

 

CONCLUSION:

God’s righteousness is not criminological. That is the tired realism of misdefined ‘nationalists’ always seeking to drum up scares of the enemies within.

If you preach with flags behind you, I’m going to assume you’re a puppet of those who control, interpret, and plant those flags in the backs of the fallen. Having any level of certainty that God wants you to use violence and hegemony for God’s purposes is the mark of false prophets.

Brothers and Sisters, the bureaucratic state is never primary in the Kingdom of God. Virtues, shalom, and the Golden Rule are. Where are these in flags, their false flower? Where are these in institutions of authority? Paul says that apart from human administrative legalism we are righteous when we uphold the Law of Love. Let us Give Paul’s message prolonged consideration as we move, generationally into the civilization of care and leave the stone throwing temples of nationalism behind. Leave the bombs, make space always for new flowers to plant and bloom. In this we come to recognize and embody hope. Praise the Lord, the Lord alone. May it be so for you and me, AMEN.



[1] Nation and language are linked in God’s estimation per the Scriptures. Not only at Pentecost: 

“I will record Rahab and Babylon

among those who acknowledge me—

Philistia too, and Tyre, along with Cush—

and will say, ‘This one was born in Zion.’ ”

Indeed, of Zion it will be said,

“This one and that one were born in her,

and the Most High himself will establish her.”

The LORD will write in the register of the peoples:

“This one was born in Zion.” (Ps. 87:2–6; cf. Ps. 49:1-4, 11)


[2] Note, in distinction with later Pauline notes of "the" law, that this is anarthrous law. It lacks the article, so it is distinguished from the Torah of love that concludes this section. That Paul's followers "uphold." The generic law, distinguished by this lack of an article, is human legalism based on categorical and contingent constructions of criminology and interrogation. 


No comments:

Post a Comment