October 19, 2008

Yorktown Day

by The Rev. Constance Jones

It's my first Yorktown Day Sunday here at Grace Church.
There's going to be a special address by a historian at 11:20
and a ceremony at Thomas Nelson's grave at 10:15.
This is all pretty exciting for me, because y'know,
you can't ever be an EX-historian, any more than you can be an ex-priest.

I've been ruminating a little about the end of my career as a history professor,
especially my last year of teaching.
I was a priest with a half-time job in a church.
But I was also teaching American history on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
It was a very, very odd year –
way more peculiar than now, living in Norfolk and churching in Yorktown –
because the two halves of my life,
were entirely segregated from each other.
If it's Tuesday, I jet to Virginia Beach and talk about the Constitution;
if it's Wednesday I throw on a black shirt and a collar and talk about Jesus.
Good thing I have a nice integrated personality. Or at least I think I do!
Happily I soon ditched the teaching job.

But here I am on Yorktown's history day with all its patriotism,
just a couple of weeks before a very major presidential election,
and I'm wondering about integrating those two worlds again,
especially since today's lectionary presents this Gospel lesson
where those Pharisee tricksters once again try to corner Jesus
– this time by showing him a coin bearing the image of Caesar.
Is it lawful, they ask, to pay taxes to the emperor?
If he says no, they'll nab him as a revolutionary. If he says yes,
he'll be siding collaborators with Rome, that evil empire.

Christians have had every conceivable opportunity over two thousand years
to ask questions about the relationship between the realm of God
and the realm of this world.
But it boils down to this:
How do baptized people like you and me,
people who bear that invisible but indelible mark of Christ drawn on our foreheads, behave with respect to the things of this world –
money, power, and everything else.
The world has changed in so many ways in two millennia,
and empires have come and gone.
But there still seem to be just a few possible answers.
If I sound like a historian here today, I hope you'll forgive me.
It's Yorktown Day.¹

The first solution is a simple one.
The political realm is the highest good and the highest power.
This was the situation in the Roman empire when Jesus was born.
The Emperor was to be worshiped as a god.
Of course Christians, who owed a higher allegiance to Christ,
were in hot water from the word go.
Because if the empire – or in more modern terms the nation-state
is the highest good, if it demands your highest loyalty,
then it is indeed your god.
Denature Christianity today into a mere subset of American patriotism,
and you have the same thing.
Denature Christianity to become “just another nice extra activity”
and you also subordinate God to the things of this world.

The second option is more or less the opposite.
In this case, the political order is subservient to the church.
The state becomes a mere instrument for carrying out the church's agenda,
and you have a theocracy.
What is finest and most hopeful about this option
is that it might bring about greater social justice and mercy,
or create a holy commonwealth,
or at the very least take care of widows and orphans.
It might even abolish war, although alas,
at the medieval high point of this theory, it certainly didn't.
But the danger of theocracy is very great indeed,
for who can you trust to wield the sword of God, and to sit on Christ's throne?
Human nature being what it is, theocracy and absolute power
are less likely to give you the reign of God
and more likely to give you a tyranny.

A third option has long been extremely attractive to Christians,
especially in troubled times – like Jesus' time – like ours.
You try to radically separate the realm of God, which is good
and the realm of this world, which is bad.
The more effectively you remove yourself from the world, the better.
This gives rise to, say, fleeing to a monastery and renouncing the world.
Various religious societies have renounced
money, sex, alcohol, politics, electricity
and even conversation with outsiders.
The problem with this search for purity away from the world, though,
is that it's never really possible.
Theologically, too, it denies the goodness of God's creation,
and God's incarnation of Jesus into it.

But I have good news, which is that there's a fourth option,
and bad news – news:it's hard work!
This is what Jesus points to in his answer to the Pharisees and the Herodians.

This option says that we are in this world and not separate from it.
But that every circumstance, every moment,
absolutely glistens with holy presence and possibility.
God's presence is everywhere, all the time,
offering the possibility to transform all that's lowly, physical,
even painful or atrocious, into what is holy.
Because it is in God's nature to become incarnate,
to offer himself into the things of this world,
every moment is laden with the offer of redemption.

So we are still in this world,
dealing with stuff like what to do with our retirement funds, if we still have any.
Whether to take a new job, or get divorced, or move to Warwick Forest,
whether to choose chemo or hospice,
or how to deal with a family member that is driving us crazy.
And yes of course, who to vote for on November 4th.

We can't avoid these questions.
We're in the world, and the world presents its options.
There are always coins, and always faces of Caesars on them.
We pay for our choices in the world's coin.

But at the very same moment each worldly thing can be transformed --
not by doctrine, not by force, and not by magic.
But by the presence of the living God,
who is both above and in absolutely everything.
We who have mortal ageing bodies
are at every moment heirs to eternal life,
and dwellers in the precincts of the holy.

Jesus, in his answer to his inquisitors, is not saying:
there's the world of God and the political world.
They're separate and give each its equal due.
I believe he's saying that in this world
you must live and make choices.
Many of them have to do with money and politics.
You can live as though money and political power were ends in themselves,
or you can see that God is lord of it all, and worship him alone.

By our own effort, we cannot establish heaven on earth.
Nor are we expected to flee from reality.
Rather we are called to act as if God is immanent in, present in,
every moment and every move we make.
To know this makes all the difference in the world.
This may sound frightening, but I think it's liberating.
It means we can face reality and be grown-ups,
knowing that we can't control or fix everything,
but that trying to behave well is aligning ourselves with holiness.
It means that in the full knowledge that the world is imperfect
and rogues often make off with elected position and our 401Ks,
all is truly well.
It means that we say our prayers and then make good-faith decisions,
being willing to accept the consequences,
because we know that the God who is our judge
also loves us and forgives us.

Every moment of this life has God in it.
Every moment, therefore, can be sacrament.
All it takes is to reach out – the way we do at this altar –
and say yes.

¹ The most influential book for my own understanding of Christian Christ/world relationship is Richard Niebuhr's post World War II classic study, Christ and Culture. But his categories of relationships between Christ and culture are somewhat different from what appears here.