ALL SAINTS SUNDAY

Revelation 7:9-17

Psalm 34:1-10, 22

1 John 3:1-3

Matthew 5:1-12

Prayer of the Day: Almighty God, you have knit your people together in one communion in the mystical body of your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Grant us grace to follow your blessed saints in lives of faith and commitment, and to know the inexpressible joys you have prepared for those who love you, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.” Revelation 7:9.

“We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church.” Nicene Creed, Third Article.

“‘why is it we only take people from shithole countries,’ right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden — just a few — let us have a few, from Denmark. Do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people, do you mind? But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.” Donald J. Trump, President of the United States.

Heresy is a dirty word among us so-called progressive American protestants. Shaped as we are by extreme individualism and postmodern skepticism, we are loath to suggest or even imply that the values of inclusiveness and diversity know any limits. In common parlance these days, it is not unusual to hear people speak of “their truth,” as though truth were little more than a personal opinion. While such jargon might appear at first blush as open minded and accepting, it is actually nothing of the kind. Unbridled skepticism finally leads into the world of conspiracy theories, junk science and “alternative facts.” An open mind without filters is like a drain without strainer. It is bound eventually to become so thoroughly clogged with gunk that nothing can get through any longer. Rejecting falsehood is merely the flipside of acknowledging the truth.

As our friend Augustine of Hippo reminds us, truth is objective and eternal. Though it may be found in human philosophy, science or literature, all truth finally belongs to God. No human being or religious community (the church included) can claim to know and understand all truth fully and completely, anymore than they can claim to know God fully and completely. It does not follow, however, that nothing of the truth can be known or that all truth claims are relative.  We confess that, as good creatures of God living in God’s good creation, our senses by which we perceive the world and our minds with which we contemplate it are reliable receptors of what is true, beautiful and good.

Of course, our perceptions of truth are not infallible. In science, history, philosophy, politics and all other fields of human endeavor, we continue to discover that the conclusions we thought were well founded are actually incomplete or altogether inaccurate. The same is true for the church. Assumptions held for centuries about the nature of the cosmos, human physiology and psychology have been shown to be false. Our understanding of the scriptures, their message and application have grown and changed over the years in response to the truth we have learned from other sources. Heresy, though usually associated with novel teachings, has just as often manifested as a once traditional belief held with tenacity long after it has proven to be misleading and inconsistent with Jesus and the reign of God he proclaims. Therefore, our search for truth must always be undertaken with openness, humility and a readiness to be surprised.

Not every disagreement within the church suggests the presence of heresy. Different Christian traditions differ in their understandings of ministry, the sacraments and doctrine. While important and worthy of serious discussion and debate, these disagreements do not amount to heresy. So, too, believers may disagree over how faithfully to address important societal issues without rupturing the unity, holiness or apostolic authority of the church. Nevertheless, there are truths we confess that are not negotiable. One of these is the biblical and creedal confession of the unity of the human family. Paul’s assertion in his speech to the Athenians that “[f]rom one ancestor [God] made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth” (Acts 17:26) is grounded in the Genesis creation accounts. It is affirmed in God’s promise to make of Abram a nation of blessing (not privilege) to all peoples. Genesis 12:1-3. That God’s reign is intended for the whole human family in all of its diversity is affirmed by the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah 49:6. It is illustrated in our lesson from Revelation in which John of Patmos sees in a vision the consummation of God’s reign in the Holy City embracing peoples of every nation, tribe and tongue.

The City of God, according to Augustine, consists of all human and celestial beings united in their love for God and their seeking to glorify Him. To be a disciple of Jesus is to owe one’s ultimate allegiance to that city and to the one holy, catholic and apostolic church, the existence of which testifies, however imperfectly, to the inbreaking of that reign into human history. Nationalism, whether “Christian” or otherwise, is therefore heresy. The words “America first” can never be on the lips of a disciple. Obedience to any form of human government or any governmental leader can never rise higher than Jesus’ command to love all our neighbors, including those declared enemies of the state. Faith that puts nation, blood or soil above the welfare of any other people; religion that permits humanly drawn borders or boundaries to separate ourselves from any of our human siblings; doctrine that sanctifies segregation, justifies inequality and promotes exclusiveness is heretical. All Saints Sunday affords preachers the opportunity to remind us once again that God’s redemptive intent for creation embraces the whole human family.

Here is a poem by Berthod Brecht speaking of the unity of the human family and issuing a call to solidarity echoing the biblical witness to that unity.

All of us or none

Slave, who is it that shall free you?
Those in deepest darkness lying.
Comrade, only these can see you
Only they can hear you crying.
Comrade, only slaves can free you.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
One alone his lot can’t better.
Either gun or fetter.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.

You who hunger, who shall feed you?
If it’s bread you would be carving,
Come to us, we too are starving.
Come to us and let us lead you.
Only hungry men can feed you.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
One alone his lot can’t better.
Either gun or fetter.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.

Beaten man, who shall avenge you?
You, on whom the blows are falling,
Hear your wounded brothers calling.
Weakness gives us strength to lend you.
Come to us, we shall avenge you.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
One alone his lot can’t better.
Either gun or fetter.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.

Who, oh wretched one, shall dare it?
He who can no longer bear it.
Counts the blows that arm his spirit.
Taught the time by need and sorrow,
Strikes today and not tomorrow.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
One alone his lot can’t better.
Either gun or fetter.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (1898-1956) was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. He grew up during the Weimar Republic and had his first successes as a playwright in Munich. In 1924 he moved to Berlin where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill. There he also began a lifelong collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, Brecht became a leading theoretician of epic theatre.

When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Brecht fled to Scandinavia. During World War II he moved to Southern California. There he established himself as a screenwriter while being surveilled by the FBI. In 1947, he was part of the first group of Hollywood film artists to be subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee for alleged Communist Party affiliations. The day after testifying, he returned to Europe, eventually settling in East Berlin. There he co-founded the theatre company Berliner Ensemble with his wife and long-time collaborator, actress Helene Weigel. You can read more about Berthod Brecht and sample more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.

TWENTY-SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST/REFORMATION SUNDAY

Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18

Psalm 1

1 Thessalonians 2:1-8

Matthew 22:34-46

Prayer of the Day: O Lord God, you are the holy lawgiver, you are the salvation of your people. By your Spirit renew us in your covenant of love, and train us to care tenderly for all our neighbors, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

“’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

This Sunday is celebrated as the Sunday of the Reformation by many protestant churches. I have chosen not to focus on the appointed texts for that day, though the readings for this Sunday point, I believe, to the continuing need for reform within the church. Jesus calls us once again to the pivotal role of love in reading and interpreting the scriptures. Given the way the Bible is frequently misquoted, misinterpreted, coopted for political agendas and employed as a club to intimidate, wound and exclude, Jesus’ reminder that the great commandments are at the heart of all preaching and teaching is more than timely.

Love as Jesus uses it is not without content. To love God is not some mystical, abstract spiritual attachment to an amorphous deity. The God to which Jesus refers is the God of Israel; the God who chooses and liberates the enslaved; the God who is referred to throughout the Hebrew Scriptures as “father of the fatherless,” “protector of widows,” “rescuer of the weak and the needy.” To love this God is to share God’s fierce, passionate and empathetic solidarity with the most vulnerable among us. “Just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.” Matthew 25:40. That is why Jesus can say that the second commandment is “like” the first and greatest commandment. In fact, the two commands are actually one.

The most powerful expression of that love is the Incarnation in which God puts God’s “skin in the game” of creation. The strength of that love is God’s determination to keep God’s skin in the game even after experiencing the full fury of humanity’s hatred and violence. God’s Resurrection of the crucified Son and his being offered once again to the world that rejected him demonstrates that God will not be drawn into the vortex of retribution that characterizes so much of human history. God meets all human resistance with undying love. To meet your enemies with love and prayer, to turn the other cheek when stricken and greet the stranger with kindness and hospitality is to be “perfect” as God is perfect. Matthew 5:38-48. To love God is to love the neighbor and loving the neighbor is the only way to love God.

The scriptures, of course, speak in many different voices. Some call for genocidal war against the inhabitants of Canaan. Some relate stories of vengeance, rape and bodily mutilation. Deeply wounded and persecuted people and groups cry out for revenge in the Psalms. Even the devil has a word or two to say on the pages of the Bible. The Bible has given rise to numerous bizarre and dangerous religious movements. It has been used as a club to bludgeon, wound and exclude. The Bible has become in our own time a virtual gold mine of rhetorical ammunition for all sides of the “culture wars.” I would be the last to say that any of the voices within the Bible should be ignored or disregarded. But it must be understood that the Bible is a human book wrought from human experience. We dare to call it God’s word because we believe that God in God’s love is at work in the midst of its messy, difficult and fraught narratives accomplishing God’s own redemptive purpose for creation. When the great commandments are ignored, trivialized and displaced from their central importance, the scriptures can very quickly unravel.

Jesus concludes his discourse by pointing out that on these two commandments, to love God and to love one’s neighbor, “hang all the Law and the Prophets.” Matthew 22:40. The import of this is hard to miss. Every interpretation of the scriptures must finally serve the aim of testifying to God’s love for all creation.  Disciples of Jesus are to read the entire scriptures through the lens of the two great commandments as they are enfleshed in the obedient life, faithful death and glorious resurrection of their Lord.

Here is a poem by Wendell Berry reflecting on the transformative power of meeting hostility with forgiveness. It is, I think, a fitting image of the love called for in the great commandments.

Enemies

Source: Indivisible: Poems for Social Justice (Norwood House Press, 2013). Wendell Berry (1934-2026) was a poet, novelist, farmer and environmental activist. He was an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He was also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Berry was named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. You can read more about Wendell Berry and sample more of his works at the Poetry Foundation website.

TWENTY-FIRST SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Isaiah 45:1-7

Psalm 96:1-13

1 Thessalonians 1:1-10

Matthew 22:15-22

Prayer of the Day: Sovereign God, raise your throne in our hearts. Created by you, let us live in your image; created for you, let us act for your glory; redeemed by you, let us give you what is yours, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

“Give therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” Matthew 22:21.

For too long this encounter between Jesus and his opponents has been interpreted through the lens of our American understanding of the separation of church and state. The role of government relates to “secular” concerns like national security, law enforcement and the filling of potholes. It is an imperfect, but necessary instrument employed by God to impose a semblance of order on the world until the end of time when the reign of God will come in all its fullness. Until the end, the reign of God exists only as an inward spiritual reality that is given expression in the personal piety of believers. Because Caesar is God’s instrument for secular order and God’s reign dwells chiefly within the hearts of believers until the end of the age, the two realms coexist peacefully-unless one or the other oversteps its boundaries. “Jesus is not political,” an old friend of mine was fond of saying. “He came to change hearts, not governments.”

My friend was an evangelical of the better sort. She abhorred nationalistic rhetoric such as frequently championed by the likes of Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth. Though firmly pro-life, she was genuinely concerned about possible effects on the health and welfare of women that might (and ultimately did) flow from the reversal of Roe v. Wade. While she would tell you that there is no salvation apart from personal faith in Jesus Christ and that nothing is more important than bringing others to that faith, she firmly opposed any efforts by public schools to use coercive measures like mandatory prayer in furtherance of that mission. “God doesn’t need the government to do the church’s mission,” she was fond of saying. With that I heartily agree!

Nevertheless, is it true to say that “Jesus is not political?” If that were really the case, I doubt the governing authorities in Jerusalem would have bothered to arrest him. If Jesus were preaching a purely spiritual kingdom content to stay out Caesar’s way, I doubt he would have ended up on the cross. Indeed, a purely spiritual, solely personal and nonpolitical religion is precisely the sort Rome would have been inclined to encourage. A religion that accepts the status quo as God’s established order, keeps religious practice within the realm of personal piety and places its hope on a kingdom far away in the indefinite future seems like one made to order for an empire desiring to exercise exclusive jurisdiction over the here and now. It is, I believe, the kind of religion that led to my own Lutheran church’s acquiescence and complicity with the Third Reich. It is the kind of religion that moved white church leaders to beg Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to urge Black Americans not to demonstrate, but rely instead on prayer, patience and the eventual work of God in the hearts of white southerners to abolish Jim Crow, thereby rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. It is the kind of religion that, sadly, has resulted in the tepid, weak kneed and half hearted response to America’s war crimes, the mass arrest and deportation of its residents and the killing of its citizens by masked gunmen under color of law. Whatever else you might call such “nonpolitical religion,” it is nothing like the preaching that got Jesus crucified.  

Understand that the question posed to Jesus was designed to trap him. His opponents would never have asked Jesus whether they should pay taxes to Caesar unless they knew already that Jesus stood squarely against imperial power. Jesus did not equivocate. Note well that Jesus had to ask his opponents for the coin used to pay the tax. He had no such coin in his possession. That was not because he was short on change. The coin given him by his opponents had on it an image-the image of Caesar with bold declarations affirming the emperor’s deity. As such, the coin was a blatant violation of the First Commandment, a violation to which Jesus’ opponents pled guilty as soon as they produced it. When Jesus told them to give “to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” he was making clear to them that they must decide who will be their Lord: God or Caesar. It cannot be both. Jesus’ opponents were bent on pinning Jesus down to an incriminating position on imperial taxation, but Jesus instead pinned them down on the far greater question of who they were and to whom they belonged. The coin in their possession was damning evidence settling that question decisively.

Make no mistake about it, Jesus is political. His passionate love for the outcast, his empathy for the sick and disabled, his zeal for feeding the hungry and his solidarity with the poor puts him at odds with the claims of empire in all of its governmental, corporate and economic manifestations.[1] Whether Caesar wears the mask of Nero, Hitler, Putin, Trump, Musk, Bezos or Zuckerberg; whether his violence takes the form of public crucifixion or live streamed execution by firing squad; whether torture is inflicted by means of the cross or by paralyzing infusions; whether oppression takes the form outright slavery or labor extracted without payment of a living wage, housing discrimination and crushing medical debt, the same demonic specter of empire exercises its toxic oppression against those least able to resist it. Caesar would be lord and lord alone. He has no intention of sharing his reign with Jesus or anyone else. To that end, he exercises his power through threats, oppression and violence. But that is his only power. Caesar’s power ends at the cross, which is precisely where God’s power begins. God’s resurrection of Jesus following his execution under the legal authority of Rome is God’s verdict against Caesar and the demonic reach of empire in all its forms.

American Christians of all denominational and theological perspectives are, I think, largely blind to the imperial powers that claim control over every aspect of our thinking and our lives. Our churches have accepted all too eagerly our nation’s invitation to become its chaplain, the spokesperson for morality based on its cultural and economic ideologies. We have traded the revolutionary message of the gospel for the hope of evolutionary improvement through the status quo. We have been distracted with efforts to make the empire a little kinder and gentler rather than preaching the empire’s demise under the advent of God’s just and gentle reign. It is for this reason that the Jesus we preach fits so comfortably into civil ceremonies celebrating our wars, praising our settlement of land stolen from its indigenous inhabitants and ignoring the systemic injustice that continues to oppress the most vulnerable among us. Ours is a Jesus that stays out of the way and does not make waves. As pointed out by Professor Joerg Rieger,[2]

“Both the liberal theological projects of “demythologization” and the fundamentalist visions of the end of the world represent extrapolations from the history of empire. In order to say something meaningful and striking about the resurrection and the parousia, theologians felt that they had to do so in ways that would be acceptable to those who make and shape history and that would correspond with their methods of shaping history. Thus, the resurrected Christ of liberal demythologization fits in with the modern world view and does not rock the boat (not even putting a minor scratch on our commonly accepted worldviews), and the yet-to-come Christ of the fundamentalists uses fire and sword and all the other apocalyptic terrors of empire to accomplish his goal.”[3]

So let us be clear. Christ is Lord of heaven and earth. Caesar is lord of nothing. There can be no Christ and Caesar. It is Christ or Caesar. A believer’s life is not split between the governance of empire and the claim of Jesus upon his disciples. Empire has no legitimate claim of authority over disciples of Jesus rising above the great commandment to love God and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Thus, for example, when Caesar demands that we support, acquiesce in, enable or participate in the violent attack, imprisonment and deportation of our neighbors, whether “documented” or not, disciples of Jesus cannot comply. When Caesar commands us to support, acquiesce in, enable or participate in military action that is disproportionate to any perceived threat, will result in the death of noncombatants and is not likely to succeed in bringing about a just and lasting peace, disciples of Jesus, no matter what uniform they wear, no matter what oath they may have taken, no matter what their position in the chain of command, must refuse to obey. Jesus challenged his opponents, as he does each of us, to decide to whom we will belong.

The first poem by Mary Oliver is one I have shared before. I share it once again because I believe it speaks articulately to the present moment. The question for us: How are we to live obediently in the way of Jesus and witness faithfully to that alternative way of being human known as the reign of God? The second poem by Martin Espada suggests the cruciform shape such faithfulness might take and the resurrection hope that inspires it.

Of Empire

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

Source: Red Bird, (c. 2009 by Mary Oliver; pub. by Beacon Press). Mary Oliver (1935-2019) was born in Maple Heights, Ohio. She was deeply influenced by poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her work received early critical attention with the 1983 publication of a collection of poems entitled American Primitive. She is a recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award. She spent the latter years of her life in Provincetown on Cape Cod, MA before moving to Florida where she died. Many of her poems reflect the unique features, vegetation and wildlife of the Cape. You can read more about Mary Oliver and sample some of her other poems at the Poetry Foundation Website.     

Vivas to Those Who Have Failed

Strikers without shoes lose strikes. Twenty years after the weavers

and dyers’ helpers returned hollow-eyed to the loom and the steam,

Mazziotti led the other silk mill workers marching down the avenue

in Paterson, singing the old union songs for five cents more an hour.

Once again the nightsticks cracked cheekbones like teacups.

Mazziotti pressed both hands to his head, squeezing red ribbons

from his scalp. There would be no buffalo nickel for an hour’s work

at the mill, for the silk of bow ties and scarves. Skull remembered wood.

The brain thrown against the wall of the skull remembered too:

the Sons of Italy, the Workmen’s Circle, Local 152, Industrial

Workers of the World, one-eyed Big Bill and Flynn the Rebel Girl

speaking in tongues to thousands the prophecy of an eight-hour day.

Mazziotti’s son would become a doctor, his daughter a poet.

Vivas to those who have failed: for they become the river.

Source: Vivas To Those Who Have Failed (c. 2015 by Martin Espada; pub. by W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2015). Martín Espada (b.1957) is a Puerto Rican-American poet, and a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he teaches poetry. He was born in Brooklyn, New York where he was exposed to political activism at an early age through the work of his father, Frank Espada, a leader in the Puerto Rican community and the civil rights movement. Espada received a B.A. in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a J.D. from Northeastern University (Boston, Massachusetts). For many years he worked as a tenant lawyer and a supervisor of a legal services program. In 1982 Espada published his first book of political poems. In 2001 he was named the first Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts. In 2018 Espada received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a lifetime achievement award given by the Poetry Foundation to a living U.S. poet. Espada was the first Latino recipient of the honor. You can read more about Martin Espada and sample more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.

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[1] Rejection of empire is not an appeal to anarchy. Government can rightly be understood as a gift of God by means of which we share responsibility for promoting the common good, protecting one another from violence and injustice and caring for the most vulnerable among us. In this context, the often reviled practice of politics is nothing more than the corporate means by which we fulfil the great commandment to love our neighbors. When government (or any other economic, political or corporate entity) purports to assume godlike powers to take life, demands ultimate loyalty or imposes any requirement hindering us from loving our neighbors, including those deemed enemies, it morphs into the demonic character of empire.   

[2] Professor Joerg Rieger is Distinguished Professor of Theology and Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair in Wesleyan Studies at the Divinity School and the Graduate Program of Religion at Vanderbilt University. He is also the Founding Director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School.

[3] Rieger, Joerg, Christ & Empire (c. 2007 by Fortress Press), p. 321.