Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 4, 2004

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

On our secular calendars, today is Independence Day, our nation’s major political holiday. It is the day when we celebrate our independence and our freedom as Americans. The last two Sundays I have spoken to you not of political freedom but of Christian freedom. I made the points that Christ frees us from law and strict moral codes and that this freedom comes with strings attached, that it is not license. Rather, it calls us to an ethic of love.

We’re talked about Christian freedom, and today in our nation we celebrate political freedom. Now, I know that it is very common in the church, indeed in this church, for people to draw a sharp distinction between faith and politics. I have been told by some of you that you don’t want to hear politics preached from the pulpit. Well, I’m not going to preach politics today, at least not in the sense of trying to tell you what specific political policies or candidates I think you should support or oppose. You are free Americans and free Christians, and you have both the right and the responsibility to decide those matters for yourselves. But on this festive day when we rightly celebrate our political heritage as Americans, I am going to challenge that distinction between faith and politics. I am going to ask you to let your faith inform your political positions and to suggest a way to do that. You are, as always, free to disagree with me, but I hope you will at least hear me out.

My starting point is, as it should be for a Protestant Christian like me, the Bible. The Bible is the foundational document of our faith. It isn’t "inerrant," and taking it literally only diminishes its power in our lives; but its major themes and messages should inform all aspects of our lives. There is one central fact about the Bible that has far too often been overlooked in the roughly 1,600 years since Christianity became the established religion of Western civilization, a status it is only now beginning to lose. That fact is that the Bible’s message is both personal and political. We all get the Bible’s personal message, I think, or at least we get that it has one. We often overlook the fact, however, that the Bible is also profoundly political. Marcus Borg, whom I quote so often here and at whose feet I had the privilege of learning at the seminar I attended in Portland week before last, puts it this way:

The Bible is political as well as personal. It combines sharp political criticism and passionate political advocacy: radical criticism of systems of domination and impassioned advocacy of an alternative social vision. Protesting the nightmare of injustice, its central voices proclaim God’s dream of justice, a dream for the earth.

We see the Bible’s political message perhaps most powerfully in the words of the Hebrew prophets. Let me give you just two examples. Micah tells us, in a rhetorical question: "What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God." Micah 6:8 Amos echoes Micah’s call for justice in some of the most powerful words in all of scripture: "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." Amos 5:24 God’s dream for the earth is a dream of justice. It is also a dream for peace. In Micah we also read: They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. Micah 4:3 God’s dream is also a dream of plenty and security for all people. Micah continues: "They shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid." Micah 4:4

The New Testament says the same thing. There it is expressed in the metaphor "the Kingdom of God." The Kingdom of God is Jesus’ central message. It means, as Borg puts it, "what life would be like on earth if God were king and the rulers of this world were not." The Kingdom of God is Jesus’ metaphor for a world at peace in which justice reigns among and for all people. It is inescapably a political metaphor. If you want to read more on this point, which I won’t belabor further here, read chapter 7 of Borg’s book The Heart of Christianity. The message of the Bible is of course also personal. It is about our personal relationships with God and with each other. I want in no way to minimize the importance of the Bible in our personal lives; but the Bible is also radically political, and looking at its political aspect is particularly appropriate on this most political of holidays.

Last week I told you that Christian freedom frees us from law and rigid moral codes into the love of God, and that that love impels us to love as we have been loved. And love in the Biblical context is not only about personal relationships. As Borg has said in print somewhere, and as he said at the conference in Portland last week, justice is the social aspect of love. Love drives us out of ourselves to the other, and that means both the other individually and the other as our social and political community. In the Bible, love is political. We can ignore that fact if we choose, but we cannot deny it.

So, what does all this mean for us as Americans as today we celebrate the founding and heritage of our nation? It means at least, I think, this much: We may celebrate our country’s political heritage, but we may not do so uncritically. To the extend that we have stood and acted for peace and justice at home and around the world, we should indeed celebrate. There is much in our country’s domestic political heritage to celebrate, although there is also much that is shameful. Abroad we have much less of which to be proud. Most of us consider World War II to be the good war; and whatever moral ambiguities there may be in the way that war was prosecuted and ended, we did indeed stand up to and defeat two of the most brutal and unjust regimes in world history. Since then, however, our record is much more one of supporting corrupt and oppressive regimes around the world in the name of anti-Communism and for the benefit of large American economic interests. Our foreign policy under administrations of both major parties does not witness to a genuine commitment to peace and justice around the world. Today, we seem dedicated only to creating and maintaining our own political and economic hegemony in the world, and none of our political leaders of either major party is speaking out on behalf of economic justice for the world’s poor nations and people.

My point, however, is really only this. If we take Biblical faith seriously, we cannot adopt an uncritical stance toward our government and its policies, and that’s true whichever political party happens to be in office at any particular time. So, on this Independence Day, let us celebrate all that is good and just in our nation; but let us not be blinded by patriotism to all that is disordered and unjust in our corporate life. Let us love our land, and let us call her continually to policies of greater justice at home and around the world, to policies of peace that will create the pre-conditions for peace. In other words, let us without ceasing call our great nation to the ways of peace and justice, the social dimension of love. Amen.