BLOG 10/9/16. CHRISTIANS ARE ALWAYS ALIENS AND EXILES, ESPECIALLY IN POLITICS AND IN THE SECULAR POLIS.
For these next several weeks it will be impossible to escape the political scene in these United States, and we probably shouldn’t try. But we should know who we are. Even in the second century, a Roman scribe wrote a letter to Diognetus about the strange new sect of Christians, and noted: “They live in their own countries, but only as aliens. They have a share in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign land is their fatherland, and yet for them every fatherland is a foreign land.” So with every generation over the centuries. There has always been the proclivity for the dominant order, or for the ‘principalities and powers’ to co-opt the church, or for the Christian community to think that they can ever establish a Christian government, … but this is not to say that we can be indifferent to our leavening influence, or our responsibility to be salt and light in the political process. We are always aliens and exiles, but at the same time we are the people of God’s in-breaking New Creation who seek in every domain to incarnate that reality.
Politics can be (as we are beholding in this election in the United States) a dismaying mix of the despicable and sordid … along with those of commendable public influence. But the illusion of a Christian nation, or of a Christian political party, is just that: an illusion. The teachings of Jesus are given in the context of a political reality in which Caesar was held to be divine, and to challenge that was considered a crime worthy of death. Top that, if you will! Jesus also clued us in: that mammon rules, i.e., that the power of wealth is a huge power. We are observing that also at this point. Somehow we have to make peace with our dual role, on the one hand as Christian anarchists in which we refuse to give absolute loyalty to any national or political entity, and at the same time are totally committed to obedience to another rule, that of God’s New Creation/Kingdom.
This was probably most beautifully illustrated those several decades back when Martin Luther King, Jr. was challenged that he was violating the laws of the land on segregation by his influence and speeches, to which he replied: “Yes, but I appeal to a Higher Law!” His leadership in the realm of racial and social justice was deeply rooted in his anarchic Christian priority.
We can, and should, work diligently for social, economic, and racial justice, knowing full well that it may never be fully or even satisfactorily achieved. But we can exercise the influence of our ‘salt and light’ presence in engaging in a discerning vote for those persons who most nearly advocate the welfare of all of our citizens in those realms of social, economic, and racial justice—even justice in those often controversial areas of sexual identity.
We Christian folk live in our awareness of the already-but-not-yet invasion of this present world by God’s world to come in the person of Jesus. God’s New Creation has been inaugurated in Jesus, is now present in his church, and will be consummated at the end of the age. Meanwhile here we are to live out our lives as the sweet aroma of Christ, which is the Christians’ and church’s role if they are to be faithful.
An easily by-passed, but most dramatic text is found that expresses this in colorful and dramatic language: “For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness (there follows a dramatic description of Mt. Sinai where Israel was called and commissioned as God’s holy nation, which commission they failed, which is to say you have not come to a merely human temporal power structure) … But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels, and to …” (Hebrews 12: 18: ff) an awesome new reality inhabited by God right here and now. “You have come” to … with all the political realities of the day. Citizens and anarchists—which assures us that life will not be dull.
