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The Church and the Common Good Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis July 05, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Leviticus 19:17-18 Galatians 5:1-15
This is one of those Sundays when I could be accused of using a biblical text as a pretext: for you were called to freedom says Paul…on the 4th of July! Alas, patriotism was not in Paul’s purview. It would be sixteen hundred years before the birth of the state and another two hundred years before the advent of the nation-state as we know it. Paul’s letter to the Galatians was rather about the Galatians’ slavish observance of the law concerning circumcision. In spite of being baptized into Christ, born anew by God’s Spirit, they still identified themselves primarily by the law of the community into which they had been born. From Paul’s perspective, the Galatians were trying to meld life in the dominate culture of their birth with life in the alternative reality of their faith. Although the same body part has been prominent in the news of the last few weeks, the context of Paul’s words will not allow us to draw a straight line from the first century to the twenty-first. Nevertheless, the theological conclusion Paul comes to in the text before us, when read into our own confused Christian and national identity, calls into question our endless attempts to meld the dominate social space of our biological birth which is the nation-state with the alternative social space of our baptism that is the church. Called to freedom by both, our text bids us to ask anew what it means to live in freedom as followers of Jesus Christ. We begin this morning with the dominant social space of the nation-state. In a fascinating essay by Roman Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh, Cavanaugh traces its development. Suffice it to say that what appeared in the 12th century as estate managers (reminiscent of the parabolic unjust steward), “hired to centralize, regularize and keep account of the extraction of revenues from the lands and populations subject to the king,” soon became a system of royal courts of law that, by the 14th century, functioned to protect the property rights of the possessing classes. Competing property rights led to increased wars among kings that required additional taxation, taxation whose burden was borne by those not represented in the assembly of the elite. Is this beginning to sound familiar? As the 14th century gave way to the 15th, war became a way of life. Armies were needed to protect the citizenry. And yet, Cavanaugh observes, “The claim that emerging states offered their citizens protection against violence ignores the fact that the state itself created the threat and then charged its citizens for its reduction.” In sum, says historian Michael Howard, “The entire apparatus of the state primarily came into being to enable princes to wage war.” Enter the concept of sovereignty in the 16th century that changed social reality from what Cavanaugh called “complex space” to “simple space”. By that he means the sovereign state “‘create[d]’ society by replacing the complex overlapping loyalties of medieval societates with one society, bounded by borders and ruled by one sovereign to whom allegiance is owed in a way that trumps all other allegiences.” Now allegiance is not to tribe or clan, not to guild or union, not to church or synagogue but to the entity that keeps you and your stuff safe. The significant relationship is of the individual to the state. Soon the English philosopher John Locke took this notion and ran with it as did those who, citing Locke, founded our nation. “The commonwealth seems to me to be a society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving and advancing their own civil interests,” Locke wrote quite contrary to the apostle Paul in A Letter concerning Toleration. “Civil interests I call life, liberty, health and indolency of body; and the possession of outward things such as money, lands, houses, furniture, and the like.” “What is left to discuss in the public arena,” notes one commentator, “is not the common good that creates society at the level of common affections and common goals, but merely the resolution of differing material interests.” Think about our discussion in the public arena of health care, gun violence, regulation of markets, carbon emissions. For Locke and so for this commonwealth, “[t]he purpose of the state is to establish and enforce laws that clearly separate what is mine from what is thine.” We are united not in the sense that we pursue a common good, but rather we are individually related to a state that seeks to liberate us to pursue our own ends: freedom! Slowly the light begins to dawn on the reason that trying to follow Jesus as a citizen of the nation-state can lead one to feel somewhat schizophrenic. “Do not use your freedom for self-indulgence but through love become slaves to one another”? This is not how we have been formed psychologically or, given civil religion, theologically. But one last move is necessary to understand the identity that is ours because of the nation-state: nationalism which is “a popular movement founded upon consent.” At its best, the nation-state unlike, say, an Iranian theocracy does not enforce its sovereignty over the individual by coercion but by suasion. If this project called the United States of America is going to continue to work, every individual within the borders must buy into being one. But apparently until the 19th century, “states lacked the internal cohesion necessary to be nations.” To wit: “‘At the moment of the creation of Italy (1860), only 2.5 percent of the people used Italian for everyday purposes.’ As Italian patriot Massimo d’Azeglio said, ‘We have made Italy; now we have to make Italians.’” Once again, war tends to seal the deal. It is said that what really made the United States a nation was the mass mobilization of the society for World War I. Nationalism has brought us up to evaluate and critique our faith through the lens of our allegiance to the nation-state. Here is the point on the Sunday after the 4th of July when we have eaten our fill of hot dogs, cheered on our baseball team, watched the endearingly decorated bikes and backs of trucks parade down what is left of Main Street and ended it all with the thrill of fireworks. Our identity as citizens of the nation-state has succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dream in trumping our identity as followers of Jesus Christ. Like the Galatians, we are a people who have tried to fit our identity as followers of Jesus Christ into the dominant identity given us by the nation-state. Our primary text is the Constitution and Bill of Rights long before it is the biblical narrative. We meld the two and believe we can baptize the nation “Christian” in order to alleviate the cognitive dissonance that comes from hearing the radically different claims of Christian discipleship. But Paul’s words, if we are honest, sound as alien to us as they did to the Galatians. We hear the word “freedom” and we think of our individual rights, our civil interests called life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. When Paul writes at the beginning of chapter 5, “For freedom Christ has set us free,” he proclaims a very different sort of freedom, a freedom that, in the first place, is a gift from God rather than a right procured by the state. As we are given grace to live in that freedom, we inhabit and inherit the realm where God reigns. We may dwell in that realm without regard to the nature of political and social arrangements into which we were born or to which we have immigrated. Whether at liberty or a prisoner of war, God still gives us the gift of this freedom that is the freedom from primary allegiance to all other gods including the state. A second mark of the freedom Paul proclaims, contrary to the freedom we celebrated this weekend, is the rejection of security. I think at their best, our founding fathers understood this when they risked revolution against the king. Yet in an incredible tome on The Ethics of Freedom that I have not cracked for three decades, Jacque Ellul writes that “The freedom which is given in Christ is radical insecurity from the human standpoint or from that of social structures and technical and political forces. For our only security is Christ. If, however, we seek and even accept some other protection or security, e.g. that of the state or wealth or social security or socialism or violence or revolution or justice, this will be a repudiation of our security in Christ and consequently it will be an alienation of our freedom….Freedom is both supreme insecurity and yet, as the whole of the OT reminds us, it is the only true security.” In the third place, our freedom in Christ is actualized as we become slaves to one another. One of the most frightening and unimaginable things for us to do “in this economy” and in these times when terror has been etched into our collective psyche, is to attempt to stop acting and thinking out of self-interest: to live our lives for the other. Whereas a human being is defined by the nation-state as an autonomous individual to be protected from other autonomous individuals, in the realm where God reigns we are human as we live in loving, self-giving, self-forgetting relations with one another, with the least of these, with the invisible and forgotten ones of the earth. Such love is the proper exercise of our freedom. Paul knows we cannot will ourselves to love in this way; only as God’s Spirit moves among us, “complexifying” the spaces between us, are we used of God for freedom. Well finally, what might a community of such freedom look like? The church, says Cavanaugh in the end, “must constitute itself as an alternative social space, and not simply rely on the nation-state to be its social presence. The church needs, at every opportunity, to ‘complexify’ space, that is, to promote the creation of spaces in which alternative economies and authorities flourish.” By the way, my brother says this is precisely what the internet and blogging and tweetering has done! And it is precisely what Paul was trying to do in his letter to the Galatians. The Galatians had returned to the “simple space” the law created, but Paul was out to “complexify space” with a commandment that defies codification: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Here is the rub: two years of preaching through the story of our salvation for twenty-two minutes on Sunday morning reminds me of Paul’s other words about the power of weakness, the weakness of power and the foolishness of the gospel. I suspect most of us have weathered those two years with the identity conferred upon us by our birth into the nation-state unscathed. Therefore, with the leadership of the Social Witness Committee, we will take a different tack this fall as together on Sunday morning after worship we set out “In Search of the Common Good.” Health care, stewardship of the earth, gun violence, hunger, homelessness, education all will be considered from the perspective of a community set free through love to become slaves to one another. But this will not simply be an intellectual exercise. Whether working in a free clinic in Germantown or opening our church to the homeless or shrinking our collective carbon footprints or addressing the violence all around us in the city or literally creating space in which the community might grow old with intelligence and dignity, we will set out to create complex spaces in our society where the love that gives itself away becomes our way of being as followers of Jesus Christ in the world. Why do this? Because, brothers and sisters, the only thing that counts in Christ is faith working through love, for the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Let freedom ring! Thanks be to God. |