Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 28, 2006

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.

This is Memorial Day weekend. Memorial Day is a secular holiday. It is not a day of the church calendar, it is a day of the secular calendar. Indeed, it is a day that marks a very worldly thing, the remembrance of those who have died in our nation’s many--far too many--wars. So I was struck by the coincidence that the Gospel reading in the lectionary for today raises the issue of how Christ’s disciples--that’s us--are called to relate to the world. In John 17:6-19, that we just heard, Jesus prays for the Disciples that he is about to leave behind in the world. In his prayer Jesus says four things about the Disciples’ relationship to the world. First he says that they are "in the world." John 17:11b Next, he says that they are not "of this world," or as the NRSV that we heard has it, they do not "belong to" the world. John 17:14 Then Jesus says that although they do not belong to the world, he is not asking God to take them out of this world. John 17:15 Finally Jesus says that he has sent the Disciples into the world just as God had sent him into the world. John 17:18 Our passage thus clearly raises the issue of just what Christ’s disciples’ relationship to the world actually is.

The question of how Christians are to relate to the world has been a major one for the church throughout its nearly 2,000 year existence, and the church has answered it in many different ways. To introduce you to three major ways in which the church has answered it, let me take you back in time some 1,700 years, to the beginning of the fourth century CE. As that pivotal century dawned, the Christian church was living one of its major answers to the question of how it should relate to the world. We can sum that way of being up by saying that the church was in the world but not of it. It preached an anti-Imperial Gospel that said Christ is Lord and Caesar isn’t. It preached Christ’s way of nonviolence, forbidding its members from serving in the Roman army. It called people away from the values of the Greco-Roman world in which they lived and to the values of God in Christ. That’s one answer to how Christians can relate to the world--be in it but not of it.

Then, by the middle of the fourth century, everything had changed. Over the course of a few decades Christianity went from being an illegal and occasionally persecuted sect to being the official faith of the mighty Roman Empire. It became one of the props of Imperial power. It abandoned Christ’s teaching of nonviolence and developed a doctrine of "just war" that allowed Christians to enter fully into the life of the Empire by serving in the army. The church had become a very earthly part of a very earthly domination system. That’s another answer the church has given to the question of how it should be in the world. Indeed, this is by far the most common answer it has given. The church became and to some extent remains what Douglas John Hall calls "the stained glass version of the dominant culture." In this way of being the church is both in the world and very much of it.

Yet back in the fourth century not all Christians went along with the Church’s decision to allow itself to be co-opted by empire. In reaction against the co-opting of the faith by empire there developed the first monastic movement in the history of the church, the movement of people known to history as the Desert Fathers and Mothers. They are people who retreated from the world into the deserts of Sinai and Egypt. They lived a solitary life of nearly total isolation from the world. They lived lives of physical deprivation and continuous prayer in an effort to remove themselves from the world and the world from themselves. This is the third major answer the church has given to how it is called to be in the world, not of it and in it as little as possible.

So there we have them, three possible answers to the question of how Christ’s disciples are to be in the world all developed and lived out in the fourth century CE. we can be in the world but not of it. We can become fully a part of the world supporting its political and other systems of domination. Or we can reject the world and seek to remove ourselves from it, washing our hands of all responsibility for it. Today, in the twenty-first century, we face the same question our spiritual ancestors did so many centuries ago: How are we as disciples of Christ called to relate to the world?

The answer lies for us, as it usually does, in Scripture, specifically in our passage this morning from the seventeenth chapter of John. As we have already seen, in that passage Jesus says that his disciples are in the world although they do not belong to it and that so far from asking God take them out of the world he is sending them into it just as God had sent him. This is the original Christian way of relating to the world. The Gospel of John’s formulation of it comes from the end of the first century CE, but it accurately reflects Jesus’ way of being in the world. He was not "of this world;" in the sense that he and his message do not have their point of origin in this world. That point of origin is God. His ministry, however, was very much in this world. He lived, learned, taught, and died in a specific earthly place at a specific earthly time. He was truly in the world but not of it, and that is how he calls us to be too, as we see in our passage from John 17.

That way of being in the world was, as we have seen, the church’s way of being in the world until it became the established religion of empire in the fourth century. Before the church became a primary institutional prop of empire, it saw itself as having a mission to the world that was far different than the mission of providing the theological justification for imperial domination systems that it later adopted. Neither did the church run away from the world as the hermit monks of the desert did. The early church, before the Establishment of the faith, saw itself has having a mission of transformation. It was in the world to transform the world in the image of Christ. It was in the world to transform lives, calling people away from self-destructive ways of living and to lives characterized by love and compassion for all people. It was in the world to transform the world, calling institutions away from violence and oppression and to peace and justice, at least as justice was understood way back then. It was in the world calling people away from the idolatry of pagan gods and earthly success and to faith in the one true God, who alone is able to give our lives meaning and our souls peace. The early church wasn’t perfect. There were lots of quarrels. By the fourth century the church had already abandoned Jesus’ egalitarian approach to women and succumbed to the patriarchalism of the world. Still, before Constantine the church did a much better job of being in the world but not of it than it has done since. In other words, it did a better job of being Christ in the world than it has done since.

And you may be saying: But we live after Constantine. So doesn’t the church’s way of being after it became the religion of empire have more to say to us than the way it was before it became the religion of empire? Isn’t it appropriate for us to teach just war theory and to support the legitimacy of the societal and governmental structures that exist in our world today the way the church of the late Roman period did in its day? My answer to that, it will not surprise you to hear, is a resounding no. It is a resounding no for at least two reasons.

First, as many contemporary theologians have noted, we are living in an age when Christianity is no longer the established faith of empire. Certainly our kind of Christianity, progressive Christianity, is no longer the established religion of empire. Conservative evangelical Christianity I think still tries to play that role, supporting the dominant political, social, and economic structures of our era as divinely ordained. I say tries to play that role because the Religious Right’s failure to get its anti-abortion message enacted into law suggests that the powers of our society only pay lip service even to that kind of Christianity. So I think the theologians who make this point are correct. We live in an era of disestablished Christianity, and that makes the experience of the pre-established church very relevant to us once again.

But perhaps more important is the fact that the church’s compromise with the world under the conditions of establishment and some Christians’ attempt to run away from the world under those same conditions were never faithful to Jesus Christ and his way of being in the world in the first place. The early church got it right. Christ’s way is the way of being in the world but not of it. That is our way too. Like the early church we are called into the world, not out of it, and we are called into it not to prop up systems of domination and oppression but to be agents of Christ’s transformation in individual lives and in the life of our nation. We are called into the world to seek the lost souls whose lives are distorted by sin, fear, and loneliness and who feel that their lives are without meaning. We are called to bring them the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ that they are forgiven, that they need not fear, that they are not alone, and that their lives have profound meaning because they are beloved children of God. We are called into the world to speak God’s truth power, to work for social and economic justice for the poor, the abandoned, the oppressed, and the powerless. We are called into the world to preach Christ’s Gospel of peace, of creative, assertive, but always nonviolent resistance to evil. We are called into the world to call the nations--our nation and other nations--to the ways of peace. We are called into the world to work for the day when there will be no more Memorial Days because there will be no more wars, and war itself will be a distant, incomprehensible historical memory. In other words, we are called into the world to be Christ in and for the world. Let’s get on with it. Amen.