This line from
Psalm 137:4 expressed the despair of the exiles who were taken from Judah to
Babylon. Curious Babylonians, who were perhaps even thinking they were being
respectful, wanted to hear the “songs of Zion.” However, in their sadness, the
exiles were struggling to preserve hope and loyalty to their homeland. As a
counterpoint, through the prophet Jeremiah, God urged the exiles to “seek
the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to
the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your
welfare.” (29:7) These two lines keep coming back to me as guidance for how we
who trust and aspire to follow Jesus can respond to the cultural context in
which we live in our time in the US.
Perhaps you
feel like a stranger, a foreigner, an alien in a country that allows abortion
and same-sex marriage, and that is officially secular and seems to be
undermining even a generic Judeo-Christian social consensus. Perhaps you feel
like a stranger, a foreigner, an alien in a country that changes its laws and
how they are enforced to exclude immigrants fleeing violence and imposes harsh
measures on them in order to deter others, or that ignores or denies generations
of deep racial injustices, or that laughs off sexual harassment and assault
even for those in the highest positions of power. Rather than arguing with
these characterizations, I hope to prompt you to get in touch with the things
that evoke your feelings of being an outsider in your own country. What makes
it hard for you to sing the Lord’s song in this foreign land?
Yes, I
intentionally wrote “this foreign land” indicating the US. If we who trust and
aspire to follow Jesus expect any human country, including the US, to be “our
native land” we will be disappointed or deceived. The idea of a “Christian
nation” is an extension of the identification of Europe and Christendom,
growing out of the Holy Roman Empire, that arose from Constantine’s adoption of
his peculiar form of Christianity as the religion of his empire. The European
colonists who settled on the eastern seaboard of North America brought several
of versions of Christendom with them. All of the original colonies had official
established churches except for Rhode Island under the leadership of Baptist
Roger Williams and Pennsylvania under the leadership of Quaker William Penn. Political
and religious leaders in the other colonies thought that allowing people to
choose their own church was dangerously foolish. One of the Massachusetts
Puritans even called Rhode Island “the insane asylum of the colonies.”
At Thanksgiving
we casually celebrate the Puritan Pilgrims who came to Massachusetts as
champions of religious freedom. The freedom they were seeking was freedom from
the King and the Church of England so they could establish what they envisioned
as a uniquely Christian commonwealth. Their writings are the source of much of
the sentiment of trying to imagine the US as being established on Christian
principles. They wrote of “a new Israel in the wilderness” and “a city set on a
hill.” In order to vote or hold public office in colonial Massachusetts one had
to be a white male property owner and a member in good standing of the
Congregational Church. If you were not a Congregationalist, you were a stranger
in a foreign land. Even before the Revolutionary War, that model became
unsustainable, and they adopted what came to be called the “half-way covenant.”
That allowed church membership for voting and holding public office without
affirming the church’s doctrine or accepting its discipline.
The framers of
the US Constitution were intentional about both the free exercise of religion
and that there be no establishment of religion in the country. Part of that was
from recognizing the divisive, practical issues left over from the established
colonial churches. And even greater was their concern that the new nation not
descend into the fierce and violent inter-religious wars that had plagued
Europe since the time of Constantine.
The early
Christians were keenly aware that they were outsiders and strangers, outcasts
and aliens in the Roman Empire. The New Testament Epistles frequently
acknowledged this such as where Philippians 3:20 says “our citizenship is in
heaven,” and Ephesians 2:19 says, we “are no longer strangers and
aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household
of God,” and Hebrews 11:13 identifies with the heroes of faith who “confessed
that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth.”
The earliest
and most basic Christian confession was (and still is) “Jesus is Lord.” (Romans
10:9; 1 Corinthians 12:3) In the Roman Empire the essential pledge of
allegiance and loyalty oath (to use modern equivalents) was “Caesar is lord,”
so for Christians to refuse loyalty to the emperor and instead confess “Jesus
is Lord” was at best unpatriotic and was considered to be treasonous, sometimes
met with torture and death.
The response of
the empire to the Church ranged from ignoring them to violent hostility seeking
their obliteration. Besides the perceived treason of confessing “Jesus is
Lord,” the Roman Empire was frustrated at trying to control this new movement.
With Christians’ complete confidence of expecting to share in Jesus’
resurrection threats, torture, and even death were not effective control
mechanisms. This reality is necessary to understand Paul’s teaching about
responding to those in authority, such as in Romans 13. The concern was not to
rankle the empire unnecessarily so as to have peaceful conditions for spreading
the Gospel. We might say “to fly under the empire’s radar.” Nero was emperor at
the time Paul wrote about respecting government authorities. Nero was a
definitively evil ruler who eventually executed both Paul and Peter. Thus, the
principles of how to respond to those in authority must be able to be applied
to despots as well as even devout Christians duly elected to office. Though
Paul certainly recognized that he was being persecuted by the Roman Empire, he
invoked his Roman citizenship in Acts 16 and 22 when the Roman legal system
sought to curtail his proclaiming the Gospel.
When a rather
distorted and watered down version of Christianity was legalized and became the
religion of the empire, spiritual vitality declined disastrously. The
government assumed authority over theology, worship, and church
leadership. To be a Roman citizen was to
be a Christian. Baptism became the proof of citizenship. Baptist and other Free
Church people in Christendom Europe were excluded from public life, and my own
Swedish Baptist forbearers faced challenges with both military service and
immigration. Nazis used that as a tool for persecuting Jews as not being German
citizens since they had no baptism certificates.
In the first
generation after this spiritual collapse, communities of spiritual renewal
began forming in the deserts, and by the fourth century the movement we know as
the Desert Fathers and Mothers was attracting spiritually hungry pilgrims. In
the sixth century Benedict of Nursia was studying for ministry and became
disgusted with the immorality and spiritual weakness of his teachers, fellow
students, and church leaders. He set out in search of authentic spiritual
renewal which led him to found the monastic order the still bears his name
today. From those seeds grew a diversity of monastic movements and communities
that functioned outside the bounds of the empire and church hegemony. At the
time of the Reformation (and since), Anabaptists have insisted on life outside
of the (unholy) alliance between state and church.
Some monastics
and some Anabaptists responded by withdrawing almost entirely from almost all
forms of public life. In more recent generations, some Evangelical/Protestant
circles relegated the Kingdom of God (Reign, Dream, Song – more about that
language follows) to an indeterminate eschatological future return of Christ to
a Millennial or Eternal Kingdom, in the present opting for power politics
perhaps with a vague approximation of Christendom.
God’s word through Jeremiah to “seek
the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to
the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your
welfare” transforms “how could we sing the lord’s song in a foreign land” from
an exclamation of despair and grief into a question seeking God’s way of
singing the song of welfare in exile in a foreign land.
Growing up in
Evangelical context I often heard that we are “in the world but not of the
world.” My impression was that this was applied largely to personal morality
and lifestyle and not so much to public life. So in the world I guarded my
heart from worldly influences such as movies and music. Though perhaps coming
off as a superficial cliché, I do think it points to a principle for how those
who follow Jesus engage in public life. Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon
explored this in their 1989 book Resident
Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. I would suggest that the
“resident aliens” imagery offers a rich way to explore how as outsiders,
strangers, foreigners, and outcasts we who follow Jesus can seek the welfare of
the city where we are in exile and sing the Lord’s song in this foreign land.
At the time
when John the Baptist and Jesus announced that the Kingdom of God was at hand,
their listeners recognized that they were proclaiming an alternate to the
oppressive Roman Empire that was much, much more than a revival of the Davidic
dynasty of a millennium earlier. Their context did not question the issue of
gender as we do today that has prompted moving language to speak of the “Reign
of God” as an appropriate equivalent. The Kingdom of God as proclaimed by John
the Baptist and Jesus was also a distinct contrast to hierarchal power as
imposed not just in the Roman Empire but is common in human politics. Trying to
make that clear, some in our time have begun to use the “Dream of God” or the
“Song of God” as equivalents. I do not want to get sidetracked by debating the
legitimacy of these contemporary shifts in language. Rather, I want to consider
seriously what it means to follow Jesus as Lord in ways that seek the welfare
of our world and sing the Lord’s Song in foreign lands.
What we call
the “Sermon on the Mount” (Matthew 5-7) and it parallel, sometimes called the “Sermon
on the Plain” (Luke 6:17ff), are the manifesto for the Kingdom of God as Jesus
proclaimed it. (If “kingdom” bothers you, blame it on me being 73 years old who
in many ways relishes ancient traditions.) I believe the Gospels suggest that
Jesus repeatedly and consistently preached and taught these themes. We are
given these two verbatims so we have his message. His parables and other
teachings were designed to prompt reflection and exploration of how these
themes worked in the messiness of real life and relationships. They would be what
I would call “divergent thinking” rather than “convergent thinking.” Jesus
pointedly did not give a rule or proverb for every life situation but a way of
being in touch with God whatever life brought. Indeed, in the two sermon
verbatims he did bring this up against common and typical life issues.
The two sermon
verbatims (Matthew 5-7; Luke 6:17ff) and Jesus’ other teaching are clearly good
news for those who have been relegated to the margins of society. He offered
ways to live in intimacy with God, free from both the judgmental restrictions
of pious leaders as well as the oppression of the Roman occupiers. To be sure,
some folk who had economic means, in positions of religious leadership, and
even among the Roman military followed Jesus into new lives of joy, generosity,
love, and justice. So both those from privilege and those who were excluded
lived together as equals. This experience is translated into teaching in the
New Testament Epistles. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no
longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you
are one in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 10:12; 1 Corinthians 12:13; Galatians 3:28).
James 2:1-7; 5:1-6 is explicit about welcoming those most likely to be
excluded.
The Beatitudes
of Matthew 5 and the Blessings and Woes of Luke 6 form a sort of preamble to
Jesus’ manifesto of the Kingdom of God. They made those who may seem to be the
outcasts, foreigners, strangers, aliens of human - even religious - society the
core citizens of the Kingdom of God. We dare not dismiss the Beatitudes as
beautiful sentiments without being challenged by their radical intent.
·
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven.
·
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be
comforted.
·
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the
earth.
·
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for
righteousness, for they will be filled.
·
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive
mercy.
·
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see
God.
·
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called
children of God.
·
Blessed are those who are persecuted for
righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
·
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute
you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice
and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they
persecuted the prophets who were before you.
I am more than
suggesting that we sing the Lord’s song in this foreign land and seek the
welfare of the city in which we are exiles when those whom Jesus pronounced
“blessed” are at the center of our relationships, communities, congregations,
advocacy, compassion, respect, inclusion, influence, economics, politics.
Neither capitalism nor socialism are the economics of the Kingdom of God. In
both, the marginalized suffer from their exclusion. Neither monarchy (regardless of what current
name it is given) nor democracy are the politics of the Kingdom of God. In
both, the marginalized are denied a voice. To be sure, though no human economic
or political system or philosophy, no political party is totally congruent with
the Kingdom of God, that does not mean justice is evenly distributed in all
systems. Some do far better than others. We who follow Jesus as Lord know that
as citizens of the Kingdom of God, we will always be resident aliens. We will
celebrate and advocate justice, peace, compassion, and integrity regardless of
its context.
James Weldon
Johnson’s 1921 hymn Lift Every Voice and
Sing conveys the creative tensions of being outsiders in your own country.
It has been informally designated as “the Negro National Anthem” and is sung
with feeling in Black congregations across the US. It was written when some
freed slaves were still alive to tell their stories It was written in the midst
of “Jim Crow” oppression before the Civil Rights Movement. With hope, the
second verse recounts the bleak history of Black folk in the US.
Stony the road we trod,
bitter the chastening rod,
felt in the days when hope
unborn had died;
yet with a steady beat,
have not our weary feet
come to the place for which our
people sighed?
We have come over a way that
with tears has been watered;
we have come treading our path
through the blood of the slaughtered,
out from the gloomy past,
till we now stand at last
where the white gleam of our
bright star is cast.
To me the
ironic power of the concluding line of the hymn points to the challenges of
living as resident aliens. Those who first sang this hymn remembered that their
ancestors were brought to the US as slaves against their will. Some in their
own community had been slaves and most were being brutally oppressed. Still,
the hymn ended with, “May we forever stand, true to our God, true to our native land.”
