The Royal Road & The Prophetic Challenge

6 Pentecost – June 26, 2005

(Isaiah 2:10-17; Psalm 89:1-4,15-18; Romans 6:3-11; Matthew 10:34-42)

Over the past four years, with the war on terrorism, the reassertion of the Christian Right, increasing concerns about global justice, and the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, the issue of a religious perspective on the political  scene has come to the fore as at no time since the Viet Nam War.

With a President using theological language in his political addresses and the Bishops using political language in pastoral letters, we’re challenged, I believe, to take a close look, once again, at what the gospel is saying to us about these relationships.

As I see it there have always been two lines, two approaches, two traditions in the relationship between Judeo-Christian and Moslem religious teaching and the politics/social/economic worlds in which these communities find themselves.

One I’ll call the royal road, and the other I’ll call the prophetic challenge.

The royal road we find in the Old Testament wherever we find an emphasis on David, or on Jerusalem, or on the military triumphs of the people of God.

“I have made a covenant with my chosen one” the psalm for today says.  “I have sworn an oath to my servant David.”

The first editor of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, could, in fact have been Solomon’s court historian.  The structure of that edition is so crafted as to see all of history as moving toward that glorious institution of the monarchy under David and his son.  And, when it didn’t work out, the hope for the re-establishment of that religious establishment formed the background for the development of Messianism, the hope for a coming Messiah,  a new king, earthly or heavenly, who would set all things right.

Now, in spite of the obvious Messianic connections of Christianity, the royal road came only slowly to Christian thought and teaching.

It’s true that the Gospels tend to blame the Jews for the death of Jesus more than they blame the Romans.  First Peter says to “honor the emperor”, but I think that’s mostly cover.  The Book of Revelation and much of the early Church’s teaching see the powers of this world as demonic powers.  The royal road they believed was the road to hell.

Only when Christianity was legalized by Constantine in 325 C.E. did religion become the spiritual support for the powers that be, a spiritual support it was to remain for the next 1600 years.

See, where the royal road can’t crush its opponents, it give them lots of money and invites them to live in the palace – and that certainly happened to the Church.  In medieval times the Church, for all practical purposes, was the state, always a power to be reckoned with politically.  And in England, the state was pretty much the Church, with the king or queen as the head, and the clergy as public servants.

For a long time, in spite of the separation of Church and state, the Episcopal Church in the United States was, in many ways the spiritual support for the elite and powerful.  St. John’s church near the White House in Washington is known as the “Church of the Presidents”.  The diocesan Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul in Washington is called the “National Cathedral”, the venue for most state funerals and prayer services.  Trinity Church in New York City owned most of the real estate on Wall Street (which probably meant that Wall Street owned the church.)  Here in Monterey, Hearst and Crocker built St. John’s Chapel to go to when they were vacationing at the Del Monte Hotel and couldn’t go to Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, which they’d also built.

When the royal road can’t crush its opponents it gives them lots of money and invites them to live in the palace.

That power, for a variety of reasons, began shifting away from the Episcopal Church in the late 1960’s, and, with a prodding of our institutional conscience by the civil rights movement and with Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, moved in a more Evangelical direction.  But regardless of its institutional expression, the connection between religion and the power structure has remained and seems even to be getting stronger.  Its justification for the church has remained the same as well.  You can have more influence, theoretically, by working from the inside than from the outside.  Once you can wield power in the world you can, theoretically, use that power to advance God’s Kingdom.  And that, theoretically, was what God was doing with David.

The problem is that power corrupts.  Along with the fact that so much of what is awkwardly implanted in our conscience seems to contradict the ways of political and economic power and it smooth social functioning.  “Do you think I have come to bring peace on earth?  I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”  “For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.”

So much for family values.

“Enter into the rock and hide in the dust from before the terror of the Lord, and from the glory of his majesty… the haughty eyes of people shall be brought low, and the pride of everyone shall be humbled.”

From the day that Nathan walked into David and said, “You can’t do that with Bathsheba” the prophet has challenged the royal road.  Those on the outside have spiritually challenged those who are in power.  Spoken truth to power, as the saying goes.

Just as there was a strong pro-monarchy tradition in the Southern Kingdom of Judah where David was from, there was a kind of contempt for monarchy in the north.  In the Book of Judges, it tells how when Jerubbaal was made the King his brother told the story of the King of the trees.  It seems the trees desired to have a king so they went to the olive tree and asked him to be King.  But the olive trees said, “Should I leave my fatness which honors God and man to be promoted over trees?”  And they went to the fig trees who said, “Should I leave my sweetness and my good fruit to be promoted over trees?”  And the vine said, “Should I leave my wine?”  Only the bramble was willing to be king.

In another place Ezekiel takes on Jezebel.  In another place Amos says “woe to those at east on Zion.”  At the same time that Peter says to honor the Emperor, the Book of Revelation is calling the Emperor the Anti-Christ.  The Song of Mary says the proud will be scattered in their conceit, the mighty cast down from their thrones. (Try e-mailing that today and you’d get turned in to Homeland Security.)

But it’s all woven together right there in the Bible, the royal road and the prophetic challenge.

Even within the Church establishment, Saint Francis, Thomas a’ Becket, Thomas More, Martin Luther King, and many others, known and unknown, have stood up and said to the Church that the powers of this world, that we are attempting to use, are using us instead, that we’re on the wrong side.  Those people have often been called traitors, if they’re not call martyrs first.

Both of those traditions, the supportive and the subversive, the royal road and the prophetic challenge, civil religion and the religion of protest, make demands on us as Christians.  But rather than go back and forth, or choose sides, or try to straddle a very thin line, I think we need to find a way to transcend the opposition, the seeming contradiction.   And I think we get some advice on how to do that if we look to the Epistle reading from Paul that he, interestingly enough, wrote to the Romans, and that we read today and have been reading from for the past few weeks.

“We are buried with Christ in his death,” he says, “to walk in newness of life.”  With Jesus Christ the game has changed.  The old rules do not apply.  God’s not for Rome or against Rome.  Rome’s power is irrelevant when matched against the resurrection.  God doesn’t like George Bush and hate Osama bin Laden, or the other way around.  God doesn’t favor Israel over the Palestinians.  God doesn’t care if we say the pledge of allegiance. 

Nations come and nations go, but the life of God is beyond all that, and it’s to that life that we’re reborn.  We may feel sometimes that being a Christian in the world is like walking on a tightrope, but God came to us in Jesus and told us we can fly, so we don’t worry about falling any more.

We don’t find life in the world, or the institutions of the world, or the experiences in the world, we bring life to the world, however we find it, in whatever way we’re called.  God is in the whole of life, in the flow of life, not nailed to or entombed in any particular artificially frozen expression of it.  God is not confined or exhausted by any political system, or law, or religion, or way of life.  And that inevitably involves us in some difficult contradictions.

God was in both David and Nathan.  God can be in sickness and health, in marriage and divorce, in war and peace.

Our job doesn’t involve creating the world, claiming omniscience, and making universal judgments, but what it does involve is, in small ways, bringing the love and joy and peace and compassion and forgiveness and healing, that we’ve experienced through the grace of God, to the world as that world’s been given us.

If we can do that, however we do that, we won’t lose our reward, and we’ll help to bring in, help to disclose, the Kingdom of Heaven.

Thanks be to God.