The Resistance of the Holy City

Given the increasingly disturbing news about what our sisters and brothers in Latin America are facing at our borders right now, I have come back to and am reposting the text of my sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, just a few weeks ago. The video of the sermon is also available online.

A Reading from the Revelation to John (21:10, 22-22:5) 

In the spirit the angel carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day-- and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb's book of life. Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

In moments of grief or pain, there are some scriptural texts that always seem to come to mind. Texts from the Bible, for example, that you hear most often at funerals. This is why people love the 23rd Psalm with its image of a shepherd who leads us even when we are walking through the valley of the shadow of death. Or Isaiah 25, where we hear the promise that, in the end, God will prepare a feast for all people and destroy death forever, wiping the tears from all faces. In John's Gospel, there is the story of Jesus telling a grieving Martha who is struggling with the death of her brother Lazarus that he—Jesus—is the resurrection and the life. And in the Revelation to John, we see promises of our eternal home where we are reunited with those who have gone before, where the God who sometimes seems distant or hard-to-find dwells right here in the midst of us. These are powerful and comforting texts.

And though it is true that the Revelation to John, with its hopeful vision of the end of our existence, is indeed a comforting text when you are struggling with the painful reality of death, the truth is that this book was written to be a very different sort of comfort in the late first century. For a long time, people thought this book was written to comfort Christians who were suffering under the despotic reign of Emperor Domitian. In this line of thinking, the book of Revelation was written to give hope to Christians who were being imprisoned and killed because of their beliefs. It envisioned a picture of an empire-wide persecution of the Christian faith.

But modern scholarship would actually urge us to tone down that understanding of the first century, this idea of widespread persecution of Christians at that time. Because, truth be told, there simply is not any strong evidence of any empire-wide persecution which singled out Christians for imprisonment in the late first century. Don't get me wrong, there were indeed martyrs in this time and place. There was persecution. There were Christians who died because of their belief in Jesus Christ. But these were exceptions in the imperial life. They were not the norm. Persecution, when it occurred, was sporadic and limited to specific localities under Domitian’s reign.

Modern scholars, instead, believe that this book was written in the context of a significant conflict among Christians themselves in Asia minor. The key question in the book of Revelation is whether you participate and remain complicit in the Empire of Rome, symbolized by Babylon in Revelation, or whether you resist imperial power. Because there were Christians who did not view the Empire as a dangerous force, one that advanced the aims of darkness and the devil. For these Christians it didn't matter if you sacrificed incense to the image of the Emperor or called him Lord, you could do all of that still believe that Jesus was the supreme Lord.

The book of Revelation was written as a polemic against that view, insisting throughout that you cannot call Jesus and Caesar Lord at the same time. There can be only one Lord. Those Christians who thought that you could compromise with the Empire are criticized in Revelation for being lukewarm in their faith, for not fully committed to the new reality which has been brought about by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And it may be easy for us in the 21st century to look back 2,000 years at all of this and find it somewhat interesting, but probably foreign to our existence. But that is, I think, a misunderstanding a well. Because I think Revelation raises some very interesting questions for Christians today, particularly those of us who live in the United States. Because there are significant arguments to be made that the power of United States in our own time far surpasses whatever power Rome had at the height of its imperial rule. We don't talk about the American Empire, generally, but if you look at the amount of territory which is under the control of our country, if you consider how many armed forces we have stationed in continents and countries all over the world, and if you think how other countries respond to what our country does or doesn't do… (when the United States sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold, right?) If you think of all of this, it becomes clear pretty quickly that the United States is a country that wields significant power in this world, almost an imperial level of power, perhaps.

And so I think that when we read the book of Revelation we must ask ourselves some very hard questions about our allegiances, our citizenship, and our patriotism. We must ask ourselves whether our citizenship and patriotism has ever crossed a line somewhere or sometime, whether our love for our country has ever risen above our love for the risen Christ—and the Body of Christ for whom he died

Today’s reading from the 21st chapter of Revelation helps frame this question in a very helpful way, I think. Because one of the most significant realities of the Roman Empire was that the whole world existed in two separate groups. There were Roman citizens who were treated a very specific way and there was everyone else. Paul even took advantage of this when he was arrested and brought before the courts, saying, “Hey, I’m a Roman citizen. You can’t do this to me!” By the late first century, the early Christian church, though, was a tremendously mixed community. The church began as a sect within Judaism but quickly grew to include Gentiles. The church included those who were rich and those who were poor, those who were slave and those who were free, and people from many nations and ethnicities and citizenships. And in the Christian church all of those people were placed on equal footing around the Eucharistic table.

The problem with getting very comfortable with the Empire in the late first century was that not everyone could do that. Members of the church who were Roman citizens could indeed enjoy their much greater freedom, but they could only do that while also acknowledging that other people—other people right in their church—did not have the freedom they had. And that is why the author of Revelation urges resistance instead of complicity, insisting that the power of the Empire is always a diabolical power precisely because of the way that the Empire (no matter the era in which it exists) seeks to carve up and divide humanity so that the power of the Empire may grow, so that the wealth of the State may increase. And that power is absolutely contrary to the power of love which raised Jesus from the dead, the power that seeks to reconcile a divided humanity.

And so, when John of Patmos sees the New Jerusalem in today’s epistle reading, he says, “The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.” In saying this, what he is doing is painting a picture which is a stark contrast to the picture of Rome—the other city where, supposedly, the other nations will come, but only in order to be subservient to the power of the State.

No, the power of the New Jerusalem is very different, and the nations don’t come to be slaves, they come to be set free. The only thing kept out of this city, according to John, is that which refuses to be made clean by the blood of the slain Lamb and to those who practice abomination—which defined in Revelation as those were willing to sacrifice much at the altar of the state, no matter the cost to their fellow Christians. That is the abomination.

And you and I, we live in a world which is also divided into two groups, those are American citizens and to those who are not. And I think we are meant to feel uncomfortable when we read this text. We should feel uncomfortable at the reality that some of our sisters and brothers in Christ have markedly different freedoms than we have—and not only our sisters and brothers in other countries of the world, but our sisters and brothers right here in the United States who don’t have all the same benefits we have because they are not citizens of the State.

I talked a couple weeks ago when I was preaching on Revelation about how sometimes we are willing to sacrifice relationships with friends and fellow Christians at the altar of our preferred political party, that we will angrily insist that our party is right—right no matter what—even if it burns a friendship to the ground, and how that is a form of idolatry to the State.

But there are all kinds of idolatry out there, all kinds of ways of sacrificing to the State at the expense of your fellow Christian. And if we truly believe that the vision of the end of human existence described in Revelation 21 is a city that quite literally leaves its doors open all the time, that in the end of human existence there are no checkpoints, but everyone is welcome to come in, everyone is treated as a person, then we have to ask whether or not those of us who are citizens are complicit in another sacrifice, one that is willing two let the State place the personhood and humanity of our fellow Christians to the side, one that that refuses to allow the gates to be open but insists they must be closed, one that that sends people back to countries filled with poverty and violence and a death, all in the name of keeping us supposedly more secure and wealthy.

Because, God forbid we lose our jobs or our comfort.

There are all kinds of sacrifices the State invites us to make every single day to the power of our empire. And there is cost which is mammoth.

Because, believe it or not, the Revelation to John was written not to comfort people like you and me. The Revelation to John was written to comfort people who don't have the right citizenship, people who have been told they do not have the same rights for reasons that were very legitimate and legal in Rome. The Revelation to John was written, instead, to provoke those who do have power, to provoke those who are comfortable, to say that if you are comfortable you are complicit. To provoke people like you and me, and to force us to ask, “At what cost does our desire power and comfort come?” Revelation invites us to ask which citizenship matters most to us, citizenship in this country or citizenship in the new Jerusalem that Jesus Christ is trying to bring about… the new Jerusalem that the State killed Jesus for trying to bring about.

And Revelation urges us to resist the Empire anytime the Empire seeks to oppress or exclude any person, particularly people who stand at the closed gates of our own country, people who have been washed in the blood of the Lamb, people who are wondering why… wondering why their sisters and brothers who live on the other side of those gates have not spoken up and demanded change. Amen.

D-Day reflections, both inspired and unsettled

Below is my column in today's edition of the Grand Haven Tribune.

Tomorrow, June 6, is the 75th anniversary of D-Day — the largest seaborne invasion in history when Allied forces landed on the beach of Normandy during World War II. Together with British and Canadian troops, the invasion covered 50 miles of the French shoreline.

This operation was the beginning of the liberation of France from the control of the Nazi regime, and is generally seen when the tide of the war turned toward the eventual Allied victory on the Western Front.

The leaders of the Allied forces knew that the invasion would come at tremendous cost of human life. As the American troops prepared, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower told them, “The eyes of the world are upon you. You will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny.”

By the end of the day, 2,501 American soldiers had been killed in action. It is estimated that 4,414 in total died that day.

As the sun went down on June 6, it was not clear that victory was coming. The Allied forces had not achieved any of their primary goals. The beach landings had been tremendously deadly, with ramps dropping men into chest-deep water in places, resulting in their drowning when the weight of their equipment carried them down. Many of those who did make it off the ramps were quickly killed by German forces. It wasn’t until June 12 that the five beachheads were finally connected, and the Allies secured the front.

I remember watching accounts of this invasion in the film “Saving Private Ryan,” when I was a student at Grand Haven High School. It was the first time I had seen a war movie that truly sought to capture the carnage and horror of battle. Later, I watched the 2001 miniseries “Band of Brothers,” and was likewise struck by the massive loss of life on that day, the tremendous courage of young men climbing into cold water and heading in the direction of machine-gun fire, knowing their sacrifice was essential to victory over the Nazi regime.

Like many in my generation who grew up in an age after the draft, in a time where there was no massive conflict on the scale of the world wars which called so many to battle, I didn’t serve in the armed forces. My focus in my younger years was on studying to serve in ministry in the church. But I’ve always felt a twinge of guilt over the sense that I did not do my part like some of my friends and my peers who serve.

As I studied theology and Scripture throughout undergraduate and graduate school, my own views on war shifted and developed. In my upbringing, war was a necessary part of our world — something essential to defend the innocent against the violent and aggressor nations. I remember arguing with some theology professors when our country was preparing for the second Iraq war in 2003. They articulated the perspective of Christian non-violence, but I could not understand how that view squared with the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Throughout the prophetic literature, those who stand idly by while the innocent are oppressed and killed are condemned for a lack of faithfulness. How could we, as a country, stand by while atrocities were happening in Iraq?

Of course, as the conflict in Iraq persisted into one of the longest-running conflicts in our nation’s history, I began to question my initial views. Particularly as civilian deaths continued to rise, my Christianity begin poking at my conscience, wondering if we truly were protecting the innocent — or complicit in killing them. As of right now, it is estimated by the Iraq Body Count Project that nearly 200,000 civilians have died in that war — but that organization’s methodology is often criticized by scholars for likely underestimating.

For a time, I moved to the viewpoint of Christian non-violence, particularly as I was convinced by the arguments of scholars like John Howard Yoder, Will Willimon and Stanley Hauwerwas. But I never fully was convinced of this position because it seemed only tenable when Christianity is a small minority within the State. In my first years of priestly ministry, I served in the Washington, D.C., area at Historic Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia. I became friends with parishioners who served in the Pentagon. My overly academic views on war and violence began to clash with my experience of faithful Christians doing their best to protect their country.

When I’m honest, I’m not sure where I stand on all these questions now. However, as I look back on the carnage of D-Day, I cannot help but be inspired by these young men, many of whom were certainly motivated by Jesus’ words in John 15:13, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” I do believe that our world would be a darker and scarier place were the advance of fascism through the Axis powers not stopped — and I doubt anything other than violent resistance could have stopped that kind of power.

But I remain unsettled. I remain unsettled because, though there will be several commemorations and memorials of this 75th anniversary tomorrow, there remains massively insufficient passion when it comes to the question of caring for veterans in our country. The most recent “point in time” count found there were nearly 40,000 veterans who are homeless. Nearly one-third of all veterans who served since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 have at least one service-connected disability. Our care for those who have served is woefully inadequate — and it is a problem that has plagued our country since the Revolution.

And I am unsettled because it seems those in power are willing to send our brave young women and men to die for causes that are questionable —even from the perspective of a Christian just war theorist. There is a carelessness to civilian casualties that should feel obscene to any human — let alone any Christian. And this is not a partisan issue — both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have an ugly track record with the use of military force. In recent times, the attacks upon brave LGBT Americans who put their lives on the line to defend our country have been particularly heinous.

Mostly, though, I am unsettled because 75 years after D-Day, fascist ideologies are once again on the rise throughout the world and right in our own country. Racial violence from white supremacists has seen a disturbing increase. Alarmingly large percentages of people seem to be adopting clearly neo-fascist views on questions like ultra-nationalism, xenophobia and opposition to immigration. An insistence upon supporting the State — no matter what — is increasingly the marker for those in power.

So, I honor those brave men who climbed onto the beaches of Normandy for the cause of freedom, hoping their certain sacrifices could overcome the evil that threatened to envelop Europe and the world. But I think we must also be alert — because there are always forces willing to use the story of veterans to advance interests that are contrary to the foundations of our county. And we must be willing, like those soldiers 75 years ago, to stand up and resist the totalitarian and fascist tendencies in our own world right now, even in our own country.