Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 25, 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.
Every Sunday, as a regular part of our worship service, we say the Lord’s Prayer. We all know it by heart. Maybe we learned slightly different versions of it, but most of us at least learned some version of it when we were very young; or, if we first came to the church as adults, it was probably the first bit of liturgical language that we memorized. It is a cornerstone of Christian worship and of Christian piety. Most of us cherish it, for its familiarity if nothing else. We’re so used to it that we haven’t even updated its language from the King James. We blithely say "our Father" without worrying about the exclusively male nature of that image (although after last week’s sermon I hope some of you will at least have some reservations about that). We use the old pronoun forms--thy and thine--without giving the matter much if any thought. The Lord’s Prayer is important to us. We cherish it. We love it.
And yet I wonder how well we understand it. Understanding it isn’t easy. When you think about it, it’s really rather obscure in many ways. I’m not about to try to give you an explanation of all of it here today. That would take a whole sermon series. I do, however, want to tackle one short line from it to see what it meant in its original context and to explore briefly what that meaning might have to say to us today.
As I’m sure you’ve figured out from the sermon title in you bulletin, that line is "Thy Kingdom come." Both the Luke we just heard and Matthew’s longer version of the prayer put that line right up front, right after the wish that we might hold God’s name holy. The line is clearly important, key even, to understanding the prayer as a whole. But what does it mean, and, more precisely, what did it mean in the mid-first century world in which it was first written and taught?
To understand that we have to begin, I think, with the realization that for the people of the Roman Empire for whom both Luke and Matthew wrote, the term "kingdom" wasn’t an abstraction. It wasn’t a metaphor. Kingdom to them was very real. It was in fact an every-day reality of their lives. They lived in Rome’s kingdom, and Rome’s kingdom wasn’t a very happy place, especially if you weren’t yourself a Roman or a member of a local ruling elite collaborating with and benefiting from Roman rule. True, Rome brought peace, but it brought it at a terrible price in oppression, torture, execution, and economic exploitation. To Jesus’ audience, and to Matthew’s and Luke’s, kingdom meant violent political oppression and economic deprivation, all for the benefit of the foreign Roman conquerors. When Jesus said kingdom his listeners knew exactly what he was talking about. Kingdom meant Empire, it meant domination, it meant exploitation.
We don’t live in a kingdom, or we think we don’t; and whatever metaphorical meaning that word may have for us, we indeed do not live in a literal kingdom. That’s why, I think, the phrase "Thy Kingdom come" trips so lightly off our tongues. It doesn’t mean much to us because we have no experience of kingdom. When we say "Thy Kingdom come" we don’t automatically think "and the one we’ve got go!" Yet I am sure that is precisely what Jesus’ followers heard when they heard him say, or saw Matthew or Luke write "Thy Kingdom Come." There is no political urgency in the phrase for us. For its original audience, however, the phrase didn’t just have political urgency, it was outright revolutionary.
In its original setting, the Lord’s Prayer was doing nothing less than proposing an alternative view of reality. When it said "hallowed by Thy name" it meant God’s name should be held holy and Caesar’s should not despite the Emperor’s claim to divine status. When it said "Thy Kingdom come" it meant that world should be ordered in a radically different way than it was in fact ordered under the Imperial domination system of the day. It meant that the world should be ordered according to God’s laws of peace and justice for all people and not according to the Empire’s system of peace through violence, domination, and exploitation. The prayer was not about some kingdom in the sky where we go when we die. After all, it says "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." The prayer, in its original setting, was very much about this world, here and now, and it called for a radical transformation of that world, through divine intervention if necessary.
If all that sounds new to you, there’s a good reason for that. Three hundred or so years after the Lord’s Prayer was created, Christianity became the official religion of that Empire against which the prayer was originally directed. When it did, it lost its political edge. It became the ideology of Empire. It was never exclusively that, of course. It was always a powerful source of personal spiritual strength and comfort to countless people across the millennia, and it still is. Nonetheless, as the ideology of Empire it shifted its focus from radical transformation of this world to nearly exclusive concern with the soul’s fate in the next. As the official ideology of Empire, it would hardly do for the faith to call for the radical transformation of the Empire it served. If when you hear the Lord’s Prayer you think of heaven and not of this world, that’s why.
Now you may well be thinking: So what? There goes Sorenson babbling about history again. Well, you knew I was, among other things, an historian when you called me, so you shouldn’t be surprised; yet my point here today is far more than historical. The faith, and the Lord’s Prayer in particular, lost their political punch with the establishment of the faith as the faith of Empire in the fourth century. Its call for radical political, social, and economic transformation was appropriate for the pre-establishment church and was lost under the established church. And here’s the key fact for our times: Christianity, at least our kind of Christianity, is becoming, indeed has already become, disestablished. The Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall, whom I quote here from time to time, has said that the "the single most far-reaching ecclesiastical factor" for our thinking about the faith today is "the effective disestablishment of the Christian religion in the Western world by secular, political, and alternative religious forces." 1
Let’s look at what that means for us in particular as members of the UCC and as the heirs of the New England Congregationalist tradition. Although no religion has ever been established as the official religion of this country, and although the Constitution expressly prohibits the establishment of any religion, so-called mainline Protestant Christianity, including Congregationalism, was, for most of our country’s history, the de facto established faith of this country. Most people belonged to one or another of the major Protestant denominations. Our national leaders invariably came from mainline Protestantism. That’s why those denominations are called mainline. They were as a matter of fact if not law the established faith of this nation.
All of that is changing, or rather has in fact already changed. A recent poll that I heard reported on NPR this past week shows that very soon less than 50% of Americans will identify themselves as Protestant for the first time in our history. That’s true in part at least because a good many conservative Evangelical Christians reject the label Protestant despite their religious roots in the Protestant Reformation, but that fact too tells us a lot about our current religious context. Mainline Protestantism is no longer dominant in our public life. John Thomas, the President of the UCC, does not have the ear of Presidents. Billy Graham and other Evangelical conservatives do. To the extent that our nation has a religious agenda, it is not the peace and justice agenda of liberal Protestantism but the social agenda of the Religious Right, that focuses almost exclusively on matters somehow related to sex, like abortion, same-gender marriage, and so on. Congregationalism was once part of the religious establishment. It is no longer. We live in a post-establishment church.
There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth in mainline Protestant circles about that fact. Whole forests have given their lives to make the paper for books and articles bemoaning the steady decline of attendance in the mainline churches and trying to find something to do about it. When most mainline church people think of church growth and renewal they envision not something new but a return to what the older members remember as the good old days--a church full of children and people of all ages. They want to go not forward, but back.
Friends, we can’t go back. The church world has changed We will never again be what we were in this country. That probably sounds to you like bad news, but I want to tell you this morning that if we will look at the situation rightly it is not bad news but very, very good news indeed. It is good news because it frees us from the constraints that being the de facto official religion of a nation put on us. An established church, whether legally established or established only in fact, cannot truly preach "Thy Kingdom come." It cannot truly speak God’s prophetic truth to power. It cannot bring the social, political, and economic structures of the nation under God’s judgment because it is too invested in maintaining its position as the official faith of that nation.
When Christianity was established as the official faith of the Roman Empire, "The Kingdom come" lost its original meaning. We can now reclaim that meaning. Because we are not the faith of the establishment any longer, we do not have to try to appeal to everyone. We do not have to mold the Gospel into a defender of the status quo. We care about our souls and their eternal fate, but we do not have to divert our attention away from the realities of this world for fear of alienating the powers we used to serve. We can see our loss of status as just that, a loss. Or we can see it as liberation, liberation truly to preach the Gospel the way Jesus meant it to be preached, against Empire, against worldly domination systems, and not in support of them.
Please understand that I am not talking this morning about opposing any particular politician or administration. What I’m saying is much bigger than that. We live within our political system of course, and within that system we are free to adopt whatever political position we believe to be most faithful to the Gospel. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the faith as a critique of the system itself, as a call for the world to transform itself into the world of which God dreams, that world of peace, nonviolence, and justice that Jesus meant when he taught us to pray "Thy Kingdom come." Like the earliest Christians we are free to preach that message. May we have the courage to do it. Amen.