AMOS 8:4-12

PSALM 138

1 TIMOTHY 2:1-8

LUKE 16:1-13

Sermon – September 19, 2004

Are people of biblical faith called to care about the well-being of society – or just about the relationships of individuals as individuals to God?

Even that question itself would be inconceivable to authors of the books of the Bible. The Bible itself is the story of the relationship between God and those who believe in God – a relationship which is always within the context of community. God initiated a covenant relationship with Abraham, and God’s first unilateral promises involved descendants for Abraham – necessarily involving Sarah! – and a home for the nation which their descendants would become. The sagas of the rest of Genesis tell the story of how God’s loving purposes for God’s people were fulfilled in a very human, difficult and even sinful community of faith which was the great extended family of the patriarchs.

From there the story of the relationship between God and God’s people zooms forward 400 years to the story of the enslavement of the Hebrew people in Egypt and their liberation by God under the leadership of Moses. The pivotal story of the entire Hebrew Scriptures – which therefore makes possible the New Testament story - is the story of the confrontation between the enslaved, seemingly powerless people who God has adopted as his own and the most powerful empire in the world in the 13^th Century B.C.: the Egypt of Pharoah Ramses II.

It is a story, in short, about God’s intervention in history on the side of an oppressed community. From the Egyptian point of view, it’s a story about politics.

The story of the Exodus was seen that way by some other people, too. This is why, in most of the states of the American south before the Civil War, it was illegal to teach slaves the story of the Exodus. In the so-called “Bible Belt”, teaching the premier Bible Story about God’s intervention in history on the side of the oppressed could have gotten someone jail time.

You see, slave owners wanted slaves to have “religion” – religion which was as individualistic and as focussed on personal deliverance from suffering in heaven as possible. The Bible, on the other hand, teaches faith – faith in a loving and powerful God who is alive and active in the world today and cares about the well-being of all God’s people here and now, not just after they’re dead.

This faith in the real God is so powerful and so contagious that, despite the legal sanctions, the word about the Exodus story got out – and formed a touchstone for the experience of African American Christians, and anyone else who could see the connection between the 13^th Century B.C. and the 19^th – or the 20^th, or the 21^st – Centuries A.D.

The importance of holiness and righteousness in the community is repeatedly stressed in the Hebrew Scriptures: the whole Torah (the Five Books of Moses) is saturated with it in a way that makes them a bit foreign for people raised on American individualism. The prophets, too, were repeatedly calling God’s judgment down upon the community for the unfaithfulness and social injustice of the community. The tirade of the prophet Amos in today’s first reading against those who economically exploit vulnerable people is designed not only to turn the hearts of the individuals who do the exploiting but to cast judgment on a society which condoned or even encouraged it.

Amos finally told the nation of Israel, the northern half of the Israelite people, that unless they repented and ended social injustice in their country that the Lord God would judge them harshly. They tried to shut Amos up or kick him out when they weren’t ignoring him. In 727 B.C., the Assyrian army came and utterly destroyed the nation of Israel, scattering its inhabitants – “the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.”

In the New Testament the importance of community is also a given, but the context is different: in New Testament times, believers in Jesus were a tiny minority who were not close to establishing social norms, let alone laws, for any area that they lived in. While for centuries, the Hebrew people had a government (or two governments) which at least claimed to be Hebrew (though most fell spectacularly short of biblical teaching), early Christians struggled to set norms for themselves, and in their relationship with the mighty Roman Empire their fondest hope often was simply to be left alone – as indicated in today’s Epistle.

However, Christianity was (and is) a profound challenge to the existing social order. One of the earliest, simplest and most profound Christian proclamations is “Jesus is Lord.” That may sound innocuous to our ears – but in the First Century it was revolutionary, because the Roman Emperor himself claimed to be Lord.

Christians, by asserting that “Jesus is Lord” proclaimed that his authority was higher than that of any earthly authority. That was often enough to get Christians literally thrown to the lions.

Dictators don’t like to be told that anyone is higher than they are. Especially dictators who fancied themselves to be divine beings.

For Christians to assert “Jesus is Lord” was to assert that obedience to God took precedence over obedience to the Emperor. Christians were not anarchists – in fact they tried to make a point of being peaceful and law abiding – but when told they must, on pain of death, bow down and worship the Emperor, they used a word Roman Emperors were not used to hearing.

“No.”

This may not have surprised some emperors and their governors, for after all the crucial event of the entire New Testament – and for Christians, the supreme event of all history – was the crucifixion (and, Christians assert, the resurrection) of Jesus of Nazareth. Christians remember the event in both creeds, saying that Jesus “Was crucified under Pontius Pilate”, Roman procurator of Judea. A political event if there ever was one: the Empire crucifying Jesus on the charge of being “the King of the Jews.”

And yes, Jesus had lots to say about how Christians are supposed to behave as members of their own community and of the larger community, including in today’s Gospel. So we face the inescapable realization that living out the Christian faith has social and political dimensions.

Let’s take the example of a small country being relatively swiftly Christianized. When St. Patrick evangelized Ireland in the 5^th Century, he made it clear that conversion to Christianity meant change – not just in some abstract way in peoples’ heads but in their behavior, because behavior is lived-out theology: you can tell what people really believe by what they do.

So, Patrick said to the heathen Irish: converting to Christianity means you have to stop the practice of infanticide, the murder of some babies. By the end of Patrick’s life, or shortly thereafter, it stopped. Patrick, a former slave himself, said: converting to Christianity means you have to abolish slavery. By the end of Patrick’s life, or shortly thereafter, slavery in Ireland was abolished.

(This means that the Irish were 1,300 years ahead of the English in abolishing slavery, but maybe the English were just slow learners.)

And finally, Patrick said, you have to stop these wars among yourselves. Well, two out of three isn’t bad, and actually while inter-tribal wars didn’t end, the level of violence in Ireland declined during the 5^th Century – a time when the level of violence on the continent of Europe escalated manyfold.

Being a Christian is supposed to make us try to change society. Each generation is faced with two realities: life as it is today, and life as it will be when the Kingdom of God comes in its fullness, when sin of all kinds and death itself are abolished.

We cannot bring in the Kingdom of God ourselves: that is far beyond the ability of the most inspired, united and vigorous effort of Christians imaginable. But, that does not mean that we are supposed to sit on our behinds and accept the world as it is while people suffer. We are supposed to be servants of God “preparing the way” for Christ when he returns by doing the right thing – no matter how seemingly small and no matter how high the price we have to pay to do the right thing.

As the preacher at Jason Wells’ ordination yesterday said, “Ministry is not just about pulling drowning people out of the river – it’s about walking upstream and finding out who’s throwing them into the river.”

And so we, in our time, face realities which seem at times just as horrific as those faced by Patrick a millenium and a half ago. And Christians are called both to respond to the needs of the oppressed and to seek to end oppression.

For example: one long-established and deeply felt outreach ministry of this church is help for the residents of the Shelter for Battered Women and their children in Middlesex County. Ever since Mother’s Day, 1992 we have sent gifts to help these victims in their recovery and determination to build new lives. The effort includes annual gifts from Vacation Bible School children, annual gifts from all sorts of people for school supplies in September, and gifts throughout the year in the marked baskets for those who have fled their abusers often in fear for their lives, and have to start over with nothing.

It’s essential, but not enough, to help the victims. Christians are called to “Go upriver and stop people from being thrown in.” I don’t know the whole history of the change in the legal status of domestic violence, but I seriously suspect that there were Christians among those who lobbied to make illegal what is clearly immoral, because while abusers don’t listen to the church, they might have to listen to cops and district attorneys.

Let me read you the first paragraph of New Jersey’s “Prevention of Domestic Violence Act.” “The Legislature finds and declares that domestic violence is a serious crime against society; that there are thousands of persons in this State who are regularly beaten, tortured and in some cases even killed by their spouses or cohabitants; that a significant number of women who are assaulted are pregnant; that victims of domestic violence come from all social and economic backgrounds and ethnic groups; that there is a positive correlation between spousal abuse and child abuse; and that children, even when they themselves are not physically assaulted, suffer deep and lasting emotional effects from exposure to domestic violence. It is therefore, the intent of the Legislature to assure the victims of domestic violence the maximum protection from abuse the law can provide.”

Do you know when this law was passed? 1905? 1935? How about 1990? And just so it would be clear the Legislature wasn’t rushing into anything, this Act officially became effective November 12, 1991. This is not a victory won way back on the misty past, folks. And passing a law, of course, was just a start: it’s getting it taken seriously in every jurisdiction in the State and among all sorts and conditions of people. And of course ultimately, the objective is to make domestic violence not merely illegal but unthinkable.

That would take a cultural change of the first magnitude.

I doubt it will happen this side of the coming of the Kingdom of God, when all evil will end, because human sin is so persistent; but we can come a whole lot closer to making it unthinkable in our lifetimes than we have come so far.

It is good that we have so many shelters for the victims of domestic violence now, and that so many people go to them, because without them many more women would be being killed. But if the shelters are still packed 100 years from now, it means that Christians and other caring people have failed to change the culture.

To that end, it is entirely appropriate for Christians and, yes, the Church to seek to shape the culture so that all people can be, as Joe Torre puts it, “Safe at home.”

Of course, asking if the Church should be “a shaper of society” or not is really silly; the Church is such a shaper whether it wants to be or not. If the Church ignores the oppressed it acquiesces in their oppression, and the Church will be called to account by its Head, who is not any bishop: The Head of the Church is Christ.

So the Church is inextricably bound up in society, and must take stands, and while we at St. Barnabas specifically can’t do everything about everything, we can, and do, do something about something.

Whether a Church should be partisan, however, is another question. Some churches are unblushingly partisan, on one side of the aisle or another. We are not such a church. We have a wonderful mix of perspectives here, and that’s fine.

In some churches it’s expected that if the pastor takes a position on an issue all members are supposed to agree with their pastor. As any number of people could tell you, that is not the case here! We all are wrestling with what the Holy Spirit is calling each of us and/or all of us to be or do, and we all may receive inspiration from the Spirit.

In some churches, discussions on “hot button” issues either fill the sanctuary regularly or are banished to the parking lot. We at St. Barnabas have in the past year-and-a-half developed a third alternative: forums on a week night which give an opportunity for "candid and caring sharings" on a topic or a theme - not a debate or an effort to overcome other opinions but an effort to share perspectives, to listen, to explore, and to understand each other. There may continue to be a wide variety of perspectives, and that’s fine. The world today is a long way from the Kingdom of God, and there may be lots of different perspectives on how Christians can best influence the world to prepare for it, and different people inevitably will have different priorities as well as different skills.

So we will have our next forum on Monday, October 4, 7:30 – 9:00 pm in the Bolmer Room. The topic is very broad – “Faith and Politics” – and what I invite you to think about is “How does your faith influence your stands on various issues and on involvement with the world itself?”

We are called by God to be “in the world but not of the world.” And, in a country both wealthy and materialistic, we are called to obey Jesus, who in today’s Gospel warns us, “You cannot serve God and wealth.” What ramifications for our lives and for society does that commandment have? Well, that could be a whole additional sermon, so for today I’ll just leave you with this: it does have ramifications. Let’s talk about it on the Feast Day of St. Francis of Assisi.

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church